It had been sometime since we had had a briefing from VAKT. It was formed in 2018 by a group of oil majors, traders, and trade finance providers. Its founding partners had seen a problem that they believed required their collective action: the physical post trade process was reliant on manual, complex, repetitive and therefore error-prone processes. By coming together and conducting their post trade work on a blockchain-enabled platform, they saw that these problems could be solved, and that they could better protect the value of their trades. Today, VAKT is essentially a set of platforms that its customers are connected to via APIs to exchange, compare and agree on data relating to physical oil trades and confirmations, vessel logistics and inspection operations. It recently announced a new CEO, Tasja Botha, and so I was keen to learn where the company was and how it was doing. I spoke with Edward Cheetham last week to catch up and he described VAKT as providing its customers with “the means for their ETRMs to exchange data with the outside world.” Right now, it provides services in several areas for barge oil trades. These include confirmation handling for waterborne oil trades via vSure, logistics… continue reading
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