OneConnect Makes Forbes Blockchain 50 2022 List for Advanced Trade and Financing Solutions

OneConnect Financial Technology Co., Ltd. (NYSE: OCFT) (“OneConnect” or “the Company”), a leading technology-as-a-service platform for financial institutions, has made it on to the Forbes Blockchain 50 2022 list for the second consecutive year, as OneConnect continues developing its cutting-edge solutions to facilitate trade and financing.

The latest Forbes list, released on February 8, honors industry-leading companies with top performances in blockchain applications. Those that made the list include Adobe, A16Z, Paradigm, Coinbase, Microsoft, as well as Chinese conglomerates such as Ant Group, Tencent and Baidu.

To further its blockchain development, OneConnect formed a dedicated blockchain team in 2016 and has built a mature ecosystem in terms of technical support, products and consultancy.

Technology-wise, the Company has developed its own blockchain underlying infrastructure to ensure financial security and efficiency. Product-wise, its mature model has allowed easier access and significantly lowered the bar for clients to participate in blockchain projects. Service-wise, the company’s experts have offered well-rounded support with their years of project implementation experience.

OneConnect has been recognized by Forbes for its two blockchain projects, as the Company has demonstrated its technological capabilities for building smart and one-stop solutions for businesses and banks to facilitate cross-border trade financing.

The Company has gained traction with its financing platform built with blockchain technology for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in China’s Guangdong province. With blockchain’s unique tamper-proof nature, the platform has overcome the hurdles of information asymmetry between SMEs and commercial banks.

OneConnect’s financing platform has syndicated data from 34 government agencies to analyze a borrower’s risk level, with over 480 financial institutions offering more than 1,300 financial products on the platform. It has served more than a million businesses with an accumulated financing volume of over 68 billion yuan (approximately US$10.7 billion).

In addition, the Company’s support for Hong Kong’s “eTradeConnect” project has helped it make the cut. In November 2021, OneConnect teamed up with the People’s Bank of China’s digital currency research institute for the central bank’s Trade Finance Platform (PBCTFP), a project that uses blockchain to track and simplify the financing process for imports and exports between the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong.

The successful cross-border connectivity between the PBCTFP and Hong Kong’s eTradeConnect — coupled with OneConnect’s solutions — has further expanded the project to the second phase of “mainland imports, Hong Kong exports” from the previous stage of “mainland exports, Hong Kong imports.”

Hong Kong officially launched the eTradeConnect project in September 2018 under the guidance of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the city’s de facto central bank. It is the world’s first blockchain trade financing platform led by regulators, enabling businesses and their trading partners to carry out cost-effective trade and financing activities through information sharing thanks to its advanced distributed ledger technology.

Such cross-platform connectivity has simplified and expedited the trade finance process by reducing the need for exchange of paper documents, thereby strengthening the economic development in the Guangdong – Hong Kong – Macau Greater Bay Area.