Invoice Financing of Supply Chains with Blockchain technology and Artificial Intelligence

TL;DR

This paper explores how combining blockchain technology with artificial intelligence can address invoice financing challenges in supply chains, enhancing privacy, trust, and decision-making for upstream suppliers.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach using cross-chain blockchain technology and AI to improve invoice financing processes while maintaining supply chain confidentiality.

Findings

Demonstrates how atomic cross-chain functionality can retrieve supply chain data.

Shows potential for AI to assess supply chain stability and inform financing decisions.

Highlights the benefits of integrated blockchain and AI solutions in supply chain finance.

Abstract

Supply chains lend themselves to blockchain technology, but certain challenges remain, especially around invoice financing. For example, the further a supplier is removed from the final consumer product, the more difficult it is to get their invoices financed. Moreover, for competitive reasons, retailers and manufacturers do not want to disclose their supply chains. However, upstream suppliers need to prove that they are part of a `stable' supply chain to get their invoices financed, which presents the upstream suppliers with huge, and often unsurmountable, obstacles to get the necessary finance to fulfil the next order, or to expand their business. Using a fictitious supply chain use case, which is based on a real world use case, we demonstrate how these challenges have the potential to be solved by combining more advanced and specialised blockchain technologies with other technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. We describe how atomic crosschain functionality can be utilised across private blockchains to retrieve the information required for an invoice financier to make informed decisions under uncertainty, and consider the effect this decision has on the overall stability of the supply chain.