ScanTrust, an enterprise SaaS platform that connects millions of products to the Internet by giving each of these products a unique digital identity in the cloud, wanted to enhance its offering in supply chain traceability. The company aimed to help their client, Cambio Coffee, bring more transparency to their ethical trade business. Cambio Coffee, a direct trade organic coffee company, wanted to provide their customers with a way to trace the journey of their coffee from harvest in Peru to shipment, to roasting in Shanghai and then to delivery to their home. Each stop on the journey needed to be recorded on a tamper-proof system to validate their claims of building a direct link from coffee farmers to consumers.

The National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) is America’s largest trade association, representing 1.3 million members involved in all aspects of the residential and commercial real estate transactions. Members belong to one or more of approximately 1,200 local associations/boards and 54 state and territory associations of realtors. All of these organizations are independent, even though they work together. NAR was looking for ways to better serve their members and felt that analyzing members’ engagement would help them achieve this goal. Unfortunately, member engagement events were only available to the association where the event occurred. Getting over 1200 CEOs to agree to give up control of their data and processes by switching to one common database sounded unlikely.

Deutsche Börse Group (DBG) is a leading global exchange organization with a track record of innovation in information technology in the financial sector. DBG started to engage in the blockchain subject during 2015 and identified more than 20 use cases across its business units. Given the fact that blockchain was – and still is – in its infancy, to quickly gain internal knowledge, DBG selected a few use cases, relevant for its core business, for deeper analysis and subsequent realization of Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs). For the time being, DBG does not expect its core securities and derivatives trading business will shift to blockchain based trading systems, due to their large throughput and ultra-low latency requirements. DBG concentrated instead on use cases in the post trade arena and identified potential for blockchain applications in the area of clearing and settlement of securities & cash. Blockchain can improve the operational efficiency in these areas, i.e., shorter settlement times, reduction of reconciliation efforts, more efficient asset servicing, etc. In the long run, certain clearing and settlement functionality will likely materialize via blockchain being supported by clearing houses and CSDs to manage credit and counterparty risks.

Sony Global Education identified the need to create a more comprehensive, open, and trusted system for recording the education and training credentials of Japanese citizens. The existing system had credentials sitting in silos, each requiring a different process for validation. Sony Global Education envisioned a system that accurately records how individuals perform in academic and training settings and then controls access to this recorded information. This would give businesses and educational institutions a more complete picture of candidates’ backgrounds and help them pick the most qualified individual for each job opportunity and program admission.