The VAKT initiative was started in 2018 by a group of oil majors, traders, and trade finance providers who desired to try to solve a problem through collective action. The idea was that physical post-trade processes were too reliant on manual, complex, repetitive and therefore error-prone processes, and that digitalization and standardization of these might bring significant benefit to the industry. “Essentially, we were looking to use blockchain as an excuse to address the lack of standardization,” said Caroline Buyssens, VAKT board member for TOTSA. She went on to tell me that what was really needed was standardization, but that had proven much more difficult and slower than anticipated. In fact, the commodities space has a history of attempts to standardize with organizations like POSC and GISB, for example, yet little progress has been made. As Caroline told me, “Philosophically, everyone agrees but in practice, it is really difficult to achieve.” However, VAKT is making real progress focusing on an area of the business – barge trades – creating a single source of truth for these commodity transactions and helping to improve collaboration between trade partners, including terminals and inspectors, to create an accurate record of every physical oil trade,… continue reading