NIGERIA – Binkabi, Nigeria’s blockchain based commodity trading network has partners with Unity Bank Plc to launch an agro-commodities trade platform to improve lending of the agriculture sector.
Binkabi is a platform for issuing trading and financing commodities on blockchain. They power tokenization of agriculture commodities making them tradable and fundable on the block chain.
The platform connects all the players in the sector i.e. banks, warehouses, commodity exchanges, logistics companies and farmers, aggregators and all parties in the supply chain by developing a market place for the commodities.
The trading platform will provide an end to end solution for farmers and the entire agribusiness value chain. This will lead to the various operations in the agriculture value chain deemed as “small high risk’’ to be considered for financing.
According to the Head, Risk Management and Compliance, Unity Bank, Mr Usman Abdulqadir, the collaboration will enable all the various components of the value chain to be integrated into one single entity to have a consolidated approach to funding the sector.
“What we are doing today is just to integrate all the various components of the value chain into one single entity to have an integrated approach to funding the agric sector.”
“We have a huge portfolio of primary production; as we speak, about 40 per cent of our entire loan portfolio is in one aspect of agriculture or the other. We are the leading bank in funding primary production; we are also deepening agriculture mechanisation.” He added.
According to Abdulqadri, one of the factors that has inhibited lending and financing the agric sector is the difficulty in assesing risk. The partnership will help to improve risk assessment, transparency and liquidity.
“We welcome the partnership with Binkabi because it is a platform for bringing all players in the sector into one space and increasing transparency in the system so that there is price discovery.
“It is also bringing in liquidity into the market and naturally making things easier. For us, we see a huge opportunity in that regard.” He said.
The Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, Binkabi, Manrui Tang, said the platform would help to address the issues associated with lending to the agricultural sector.
“We streamline the entire commodity end-to-end trading and financing process for the benefit of farmers and the SMEs to make this entire lending, borrowing and trading process to be automated, secured and profitable for them,” she said.
