Working with R3 – a partner’s-eye view: Atul Patel, Co-Founder and Head of Partnerships at #dltledgers

Tell us a little about #dltledgers and the business problem you set out to solve?

Atul Patel: #dltledgers is a world’s first local low-code/no-code platform based on distributed ledger technology using R3’s Corda. We help enterprises across the manufacturing, logistics, commodities, and banking & finance industries manage and orchestrate their supply chains more effectively and efficiently through end-to-end visibility into multiparty data. We make things easier for clients through our App Hub, which offers over 20 ready-to-use, plug-and-play modules, and our LCNC platform that they can use to build further new apps at  rapid pace. We also have certification program for Enterprises on how to build Multi-Party application by yourself.  Check here.

Can you tell us about your partnership with R3, and how this journey has been to date?

Atul Patel: We’ve been an R3 partner for over two years, having signed up for the partnership around Q1 of 2021. It wasn’t just a standard partnership: as part of it, R3 made its largest strategic supply chain investment into #dltledgers – and we reciprocated by moving all our underlying assets and artifacts into R3’s platform. This was a significant move, and we’ve had great support from R3’s leadership team. They visited us in Singapore last year, and we announced the kick-off of  #dltledgers 2.0, which is the version that we made available in production for customers of R3, as well as customers of  #dltledgers.

So, has it been a positive journey overall?

Atul Patel: Yes, it’s been positive, but at the same time with a lot of learning on both sides. We wanted to build a solution that would reduce the time and effort to build an app, from an end-user’s point of view. We were looking to demystify the whole R3 Corda development lifecycle, so that more and more people could benefit from being able to build apps rapidly without needing detailed technical knowledge about the underlying platform.

This has been our mantra, and to deliver it we’ve built a lot of additional utilities on R3’s Corda – some of which made it into Next Generation Corda, that was recently released. We’ve been in discussion with R3’s CTO and the team for more than two years about the capabilities that we wanted to provide out-of-the-box, to help customers build multiparty applications without being experts in the underlying technology framework.

Can you tell us about some of the use cases you have deployed in production with customers globally and what benefits they have seen to date?

Atul Patel: We have a significant set of enterprise customers and banks who have been using our platform in production for years. Some of the corporate use cases we have deployed center on things like digitalization of import or export processes for a large consumer product company, or a large automotive company communicating both internally and with e-business partners. Benefits include supply chain visibility, higher speed, process efficiency, productivity gains, and reduced risk.  We are in process to deploy some interesting use case around circular supply chain with reverse logistics and carbon management for some of our customers.

Meanwhile, we provide large banks with software to digitize their multiparty processes. For example, some banks are using our solution to manage their risks sell down processes for unfunded LCs and guarantees, and so on. Other banks are using us to manage the entire LC discounting process, gaining process efficiency benefits with their core partners. Something new we’ve developed is an escrow finance solution that’s going live with a bank right now.

We have many other use cases, like working with a large automotive company out of Europe that needs full traceability of lithium batteries before new regulations come into force, and with a North American food manufacturer looking to implement the Food Modernization Safety Act, by providing full traceability on the sourcing side as well as the distribution side.

You’ve recently expanded into North America. Could you tell us more about that move – and about how R3 has helped?

Atul Patel: As part of our series B funding last October, we had an investor from North America join our board. We opened our office in North America partly to support the expansion plan driven by the guidance we’re getting from that investor. At the same time, we have significant support coming in from R3. We’re really grateful to R3’s teams in North America for supporting us through the last few months as we’ve kicked off our operations in North America. We’ve seen significant support coming in from both the R3 teams in New York as well as from all across North America. We really appreciate that.

The plan in North America is to work with Fortune 500 companies as they reverse the approach of manufacturing everything out of Asia and move to a “China-plus-one” strategy, which plays to our strengths. We have six offices across South-East Asia and, given all the manufacturing and automotive activities that are happening out of North America, we think there’s a huge opportunity to help those enterprises create their own private network back into Asia.  We have significant pipelines from large industrial and consumer clients out of North America.

We’re also looking to expand into Middle East geographies like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Oman as well as the UAE. We see significant traction coming out of the Middle East region into north and south-western Africa, with customers there including large mining companies and many of the banks that are already in our network. We’ve also opened an office to cover ANZ market. As Australian companies look to take advantage of opportunities in Asia, we believe we can provide a great connection between Australia, New Zealand, and Asia through our network.

It’s great to see #dltledgers going onwards and upwards as you expand globally at pace – are there any final remarks?

Atul Patel: I’d like to thank R3 for all the help and all the support that you’ve extended to us in our relationship over the past few years. I think we are the first company in the R3 community to come up with a low-code/no-code platform based on R3 Corda, which we think can really turbo-charge the adoption of R3  in supply chain domain and all the apps that one could build on top of it. So, we remain very excited about working with R3.