MonetaGo is ditching blockchain for a shift to the cloud after almost a decade of using distributed ledger technology for its trade finance fraud prevention product.
The company says that scalability, adoption, lack of in-house expertise, varying international regulatory comfort levels, and technological maturity were the primary deciding factors in the company’s switch to a cloud-based model.
MonetaGo’s Secure Financing platform enables financial institutions to check for duplications of documents, from invoices to bills of lading, warehouse receipts and purchase orders, before deciding to finance them.
Initially available on Fabric and then ported to R3's Corda platform, MonetaGo has had reasonable success with blockchain technology, including running multiple projects with international banking network Swift.
However, the firm has started to question blockchain's efficacy for larger scale technology projects. It says that bank familiarity with APIs and thier growing comfort with the Big Tech cloud providers makes the more complex shift to blockchain unnecessary.
"The move to the cloud streamlines the process, while enabling the preservation of data privacy and providing all the same assurances to financial institutions," says the company
MonetaGo's pivot follows the insolvency of we.trade, a bank-backed blockchain-based system for trade finance which failed to deliver on its early promise, partly due to scalability issues.