Development and commercialisation of an AI, ML and data enabled online commodity trade finance platform (Athena)

"Securing access to commodity trading finance (CTF­) for small and medium sized commodity traders (SMCTs, completing transactions \>£1million) will improve market competition, create jobs and help to keep commodity prices lower for consumers. Currently the majority of SMCTs are unable to secure CTF due to the existing banking practices involved in the processing of these transactions which make it too expensive for, among others, law firms to serve them. In the absence of a platform ensuring the complete legal solution for cheaper, easier access to CTF, a small number of commodity traders dominate the market, driving commodity prices up for consumers.

Currently, Distributed Ledger Technology provides the best assistance for SMCTs to access CTF. It uses blockchain smart contracts to execute money transfers between stakeholders to make this process paperless. However, this technology does not alleviate the significant time and costs it takes for the due diligence checks and legal frameworks to be created which are the major barriers to SMCTs access to trade finance.

Satoshi Systems Ltd, a UK based SME, are developing a platform 'Athena' which, for the first time will be able to make the existing legal practices more efficient. Athena's intelligent machine learning software will use the historical data of the previous commodity trading transactions to provide a suitable legal framework. The Artificial Intelligence software used in Athena is used to complete the due diligence checks, alongside blockchain technology to produce a self-executing smart contract reducing the manual work of an experienced lawyer and ensuring the privacy of all stakeholders involved. This in turn will enable SMCTs access to CTF allowing them to trade on the commodity market which will increase competition, their productivity and the knowledge and skills of their business. Successful development and the global commercialisation of Athena in Q1-2021 will increase jobs and growth, competition, quality and innovation within the commodity trading market."