Financial technologies (FinTech) are expected to revolutionize the banking industry and help overcome inherent hurdles in the current finance-related processes (Krause, 2017). As an example, conventional trade finance processes (e.g., Letter of Credit) continue to be a resource-intensive operation due to the physical exchange and scrutiny of trade-related documents that are vulnerable to fraudulent activities (Varghese and Goyal, 2017). Bank settlements and fulfillment of financial obligations are also time-consuming locking up the working capital of banks and businesses alike (Hofmann et al., 2017).

Moreover, the lack of transparency and interoperability between different networks of trade partners impedes the banks’ ability to detectanomalous and malicious behavior in the financial ecosystem (Piscini et al., 2017).

The FinTech industry dulyproclaims that the blockchain technology can address many of these inefficiencies (Guo and Liang, 2016). It is also expected to enable the creation of innovative financial services through the integration of data flows
and processes across various stakeholders (ibid).