Page 26 - SAMENA Trends - January 2020

REGIONAL & MEMBERS UPDATES SAMENA TRENDS

in various industries to fast-track growth governments and businesses. Among Furthermore, Zain Drone supports the
and help organizations benefit from the other offerings, Zain Drone facilitates the growing demand to replace physical
Internet of Things (IoT) in an efficient, gathering of image data concerning work inspections with digital inspections,
safer and faster way. The disruptive power advancement through measurement of reducing physical inspection hours, costs,
of drone solutions bolsters efficiency as it key parameters, assessing image data to manual labor, human error and shut-down
offers state-of-the art bespoke solutions evaluate compliance with original designs time for operators.
while providing advanced analytics for and performing automated stock-taking.

Accenture Invests in and Forms Strategic Alliance

with TradeIX to Help Digitize Global Trade

Accenture has invested in and formed a while reducing overall risk for banking Accenture will work with TradeIX to bring
strategic alliance with TradeIX, a Dublin- parties. “Building on TradeIX’s solid to market new use cases, beyond banking,
based company whose open platform foundation across the banking community, to address the needs of buyers and sellers
uses distributed ledger technology to this relationship will help companies within trade finance. TradeIX is the latest
facilitate the flow of goods, services, unlock trapped value in data silos across addition to the investment portfolio of
transactions and information within a key operational processes, such as finance, Accenture Ventures, which teams with
secure environment for global trade. accounting and supply chain,” said Melanie and invests in companies that create or
Terms of the equity investment were not Cutlan, managing director of blockchain apply innovative enterprise technologies.
disclosed. Current trade relies on time- services for Accenture Operations. “Our Robert Barnes, CEO and co-founder of
consuming manual transaction processes goal is to scale this capability to help TradeIX, said, “With our global footprint
that can be costly and hard to reconcile. organizations achieve touchless payable expanding exponentially across both
Distributed ledger technology enables new and receivable processes within a secure banks and their corporate clients, this
ways to share data and the full automation and trusted environment — ultimately alliance with Accenture is instrumental
of finance and accounting processes, transforming how they conduct business in us achieving our ambitions in making
increasing productivity and working capital with each other.” As part of the agreement, trade more transparent, smarter and better
connected internationally.” The companies
will work together to develop touchless
finance processes, such as procure-to-
pay and order-to-cash. This initiative will
further expand the Marco Polo Network—a
joint undertaking of over 30 leading banks,
corporations and technology providers
enabling simple, secured sharing of trade-
related data between financial institutions
and their corporate clients — to include
buyers, suppliers, logistics and other
entities. Accenture will also serve as a
preferred implementation partner for the
Marco Polo Platform. The World Economic
Forum estimates that applying blockchain,
could result in more than US$1 trillion of
new trade in the next decade.

26 JANUARY 2020