دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی مکان منابع مالی زنجیره تامین اجرا شده توسط فرصت های بلاک چین - اشپرینگر 2018

As seen in the first chapters, technology plays a central role in supply chain finance (SCF): the improvement of software and platforms allows businesses to come together and speed up process flows throughout the supply chain, enabling various forms of financing solutions—from dynamic discounting via reverse factoring to the more complex reverse securitisation. Nevertheless, some barriers and pain points, which increase the set-up and transaction costs, still exist and have a negative impact on spreads and the value created for the supply chain community and its investors. Chapter 4 showed how Blockchain technology (BCT) could enable the creation of new services and application programming interfaces (APIs) that promise to lean up structures, speed up processes and make services more efficient and less costly. In order to outline the opportunities, this chapter deals first with the use cases that could help overcome barriers that arise when discussing and presenting the different SCF models, and it then successively analyses the impact of the adoption of this technology by the supply chain communities.

Integration of Product and Money Flows

Being largely event-driven, SCF could strongly benefit from a technology that can create trigger points to key events in the physical supply chain. The combination of Blockchain and IoT solutions could offer the possibility to track the physical supply chain so as to adjust the risk at each step of the shipping process to fulfil the PO. Tracking the product along the shipping process is already possible thanks to special devices that provide, for example, GPS, temperature or other relevant data to the interested parties in a trade transaction. The key features of immutable, tamper-proof and real-time data offered by a Blockchain solution could provide greater trust and availability to data consumers (e.g. banks involved in pre-shipment finance) and generate authoritative records for the execution of smart contracts and automation in the creation of trade documents. The problem today is that perceived risk does not reflect the real risk profile because of the inability to track each step of the PO fulfilment process with sufficient granularity, resulting in fragmentation (see Fig. 5.8). The real risk profile could be illustrated as the composition of credit risk and performance risk, where the latter is related to the performance risk of the supplier in fulfilling the PO, and the credit risk is the credit quality (e.g. rating) of the buyer (Camerinelli and Bryant 2014, p. 82). The possibility to obtain information on goods to be despatched, conduct a pre-shipment inspection or obtain evidence of shipment can create data that could be matched with the PO and enable an automated adjustment of the performance risk. Performance risk also includes the willingness to pay from the buyer that depends on disputes caused by unmatched delivery versus PO. As seen in the previous chapters, the trigger event in reverse factoring is the invoice approval, which allows the release of the funding against the approved payables. At this stage, the related risks depend only on the credit risk of the buyer, because the willingness to pay is confirmed (i.e. delivery is matched and payable approved), and any tracking information of the physical supply chain would become obsolete for this type of instrument. For this reason, integrating product and money flows is interesting only for SCF instruments that are triggered in the pre-shipment phase, such as inventory financing or PO financing.