CGI and National Bank of Canada pilot a blockchain guarantee and standby negotiation platform

MONTRÉAL, Oct. 21 2018 /PRNewswire/ - CGI (NYSE: GIB) (TSX: GIB.A) announced the successful collaboration with National Bank of Canada and Skuchain on a pilot program that will improve and streamline the process for negotiating standby letters of credit and guarantees, the complex conditional agreements used by banks for securing financial transactions. These agreements, used across many industries to secure contracts, are currently conducted via email, making them prone to errors and delays in a process that lacks transparency for beneficiaries regarding terms and approval status.

For National Bank of Canada, CGI integrated the CGI Trade360 trade finance platform with Skuchain's Contract Builder, an application built on the blockchain startup's Brackets platform for smart contracts on a blockchain. The integration enables National Bank of Canada to provide trade finance services digitally to customers conducting business on a blockchain B2B solution. In particular, customers will be able to initiate, conduct and conclude negotiations of standby letters of credit and guarantees entirely on smart contracts that can intelligently construct agreements and securely communicate any changes in terms to relevant parties. The result is a blockchain-based contract negotiation tool that is enormously effective in the standby letter of credit and guarantee process.

National Bank of Canada's end-to-end, blockchain-enabled process will improve processing times, reduce risks and help strengthen the bank's customer relationships. By leveraging templates pre-approved by banks and negotiations on a distributed ledger, the integrated platform automates the coordination necessary to issue a standby letter of credit or guarantee.  The newly streamlined process offers visibility across the lifecycle, lower costs for all parties, increased security and more effective collaboration. 

"This pilot project is a great opportunity to leverage blockchain technology to simplify the process for negotiating standby letters of credit and guarantees while making it more transparent and secure. This will enable us to offer a simple, fast and efficient experience to our commercial clients which facilitates managing their business," said Patrice Roy, Vice President, Payments, Cash Management and International Solutions at National Bank of Canada.

"This standby letter of credit contract builder is the first live implementation of the emerging DLPC standard" said Srinivasan Sriram, CEO at Skuchain. "This standard is the result of more than two years of work by the Distributed Ledger Payment Commitment (DLPC) Working Group at the Bankers Association for Finance and Trade (BAFT) which our VP of Technology Ranganathan Krishnan has been captaining."

"The use of blockchain offers a shared ledger that serves as the single source of truth during pre-issuance negotiation and through issuance and re-issuance processes," said Frank Tezzi, Vice-President of Trade and Supply Chain Solutions at CGI. "This example provides certainty and transparency for beneficiaries regarding the guarantee process as they enter into a financial transaction."

About Skuchain
Skuchain is a blockchain technology company that provides transparency, security and efficiency to the supply chain. In the same way the Internet gave birth to e-commerce, blockchain provides the foundation for collaborative commerce, in which enterprises are uniquely able to work together to unlock gains while also expanding their control across the global value chain. Based on this vision, Skuchain's Empowered Collaborative Commerce Cloud (EC3) Platform has been adopted across aerospace, food and agriculture, electronics, energy, auto, finance and other industries in East Asia, Europe, the US and Africa. Learn more at www.skuchain.com.

About CGI
Founded in 1976, CGI is among the largest independent IT and business consulting services firms in the world. With 74,000 professionals across the globe, CGI delivers an end-to-end portfolio of capabilities, from IT and business consulting to systems integration, outsourcing services and intellectual property solutions. CGI works with clients through a local relationship model complemented by a global delivery network that helps clients digitally transform their organizations and accelerate results. With annual revenue of C$10.8 billion, CGI shares are listed on the TSX (GIB.A) and the NYSE (GIB). Learn more at cgi.com.

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SOURCE CGI Group Inc.