APPLYING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY TO RESHAPE THE SERVICE MODELS OF SUPPLY CHAIN FINANCE FOR SMES IN CHINA

Abstract

Supply chain finance refers to the financial service model in which banks rely on core enterprises to manage the capital flow and logistics of upstream and downstream small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It adopts the self-testing and closed-loop credit model to control funds and risks. It is an efficient route for SMEs to solve the problem of financing. However, at present, the market of supply chain finance in China still faces problems such as the inability of credit disassembly of core enterprises, which seriously hinder the development of the supply chain finance industry. Blockchain technology featuring decentralization, tamper-proofing and traceability had been widely adopted in the field of finance and provided a new vision to solve the bottleneck for the development of supply chain finance. In this paper, with regard to the characteristics of supply chain finance, we propose a novel blockchain-driven architecture to reshape the business process of supply chain finance, and we introduce the underlying technical implementations in detail. Our contributions in this paper include (1) proposing a novel technical architecture of blockchain-driven supply chain finance management system and detailing its underlying implementations; (2) designing the mechanism of the credit disassembly, which is implemented by blockchain technology, to improve financing efficiency; and (3) exploring the impact and potential of blockchain technology in traditional business models (e.g., receivables financing, inventory financing and prepayment financing) in supply chain finance.