Fintech – Qatar

FinTech Qatar

The legal, Technological, and economic framework

Impact of the Project

The project is expected to have its biggest impact on SMEs as the backbone of the private sector of the Qatari economy. Given SME’s potential of creating jobs and stimulating economic growth, financing their international operations will help Qatar expand its economic development and better establish its private sector. Digitizing trade finance core processes and providing additional funding mechanisms and logistics optimization is expected to have significant impact on the cost structure of importers and exporters as processes are simplified, transaction and operational costs are reduced and payment accelerated. This will enable better working capital management and increase SMEs access to affordable financing.

Research mission

The main goal of this project is to propose, develop and implement a new finance trade system, which is based on the Blockchain technology. The proposed project is consistent with most of the priorities of the QNRF themes regarding ICT, Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities and Energy & Environment as well as with the four pillars of the Qatar National Vision 2030.

The project pays close attention to the technological, financial, and legal challenges and opportunities of introducing a disruptive innovation to the financial sector.

Years

Project Duration

Sponsors

Team Members

Publications

Research Technical Areas

The Project consists of six interrelated sub-projects. These sub-projects address the technical, Legal and financial challenges of current blockchain technologies. Such challenges cannot be resolved in isolation of each other.

Blockchain Security

This sub-project is built on the output of SP2 by providing a set of secured APIs that will intermediate the calls between the peripheral business applications and the blockchain. For instance, a peripheral application can be a web application used by a bank to issue a letter of credit for an importer.

Project Management

This sub-project is dedicated to the management and integration of the overall cluster. It is also responsible for managing dissemination activities and publication of academic works.

Augmented Intelligence

The usable synthetic from simulation or real anonymized data collected from end-users along with the conceptual applications will serve the fourth subproject (SP4). In fact, the generated data will be fed into the blockchain and its accompanying data store to ensure that the transaction data and the attached data are properly stored in the blockchain and the data store, respectively, and to train the AI modules developed in SP4.

Resource Complementarity

This sub-project will participate in suggesting new financial instruments and policies as well as evaluating the financial and economic feasibility of the suggested governance schemes before including them in the suggested final governance manual.

Governance of the Trade Finance Ecosystem

This sub-project will handle the governance issue of the newly proposed solution. Its main aim is to align the cluster’s activities with the Qatar FinTech taskforce and to suggest a new governance scheme that will ensure an optimal implementation of the technical solution in the Qatari context.

Blockchain Infrastructure

This sub-project will develop the next-generation blockchain infrastructure with innovative features that are aligned with the basic requirements of business applications such as trade finance.

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