Blockchain-based Loan Marketplace Streamsource Raises $1 Mn Seed Funding from Accel India

Gurgaon-based StreamSource Technologies, a decentralized marketplace for loans, has raised $1 million in seed funding from Accel India, making it Accel’s first local investment in the blockchain sector.

Interestingly, StreamSource was founded in 2018 by a former Uber and an Ola executive -- Mayank Tewari and Prerit Srivastava, respectively. While Mayank was General Manager of Products at Uber, Prerit was CEO of Qarth Technologies, which was aquired by Ola in 2016 and he was at Products team at Ola.

The startup will utilize the funds raised in further developing its product, while also growing its sales team in the US and hiring local resources in markets such as Australia and UK where it plans to go next. The startup also is working to expand the product bring in merchants, apart from just lenders, who will be able to sell leads to the lenders on its platform.

StreamSource, a Quorum based private blockchain platform, is a decentralized marketplace where lenders and debt buyers can initiate and settle transactions that includes buying and selling of credit approved leads and whole loan transactions.

Quorum is an enterprise-focused version of variant of the Ethereum blockchain, developed by J.P. Morgan.

Streamsource is currently working with a few mid-size lenders in the US, the names of which it did not disclose.

The company said it picked the US as it first market as the decision making for processing of unsecured loans in India is far deeper, more complex and requires manual intervention.

“The problem has been known for years, but it hasn’t been solved because traditional technologies are generally very inefficient in transactions like this where both parties do not want data to be shared but they want to collaborate,” said Prerit Srivastava, co-founder of Streamsource.

Prayank Swaroop, Principal at Accel Partners, said, “We’ve been trying to do investments in this space for the longest time, but what we found was people were artificially trying to create blockchain use cases. Here we found that this is a business need and that gave us confidence to invest in them."

Source - Economic Times - ET Tech

India's ICICI Bank Joins JP Morgan's Blockchain-based Payment Project

Last week, J.P. Morgan had announced the expansion of its blockchain-based payment project called Interbank Information Network (IIN), the first live blockchain service offered by the firm. More than 75 banks have signed up to be part of IIN, the largest number of banks to join a live application of blockchain technology.

Among 75 banks that signed up for IIN, 21 are from Asia-Pacific region and India's ICICI Bank Limited is one of them and only bank from India to have joined JPMorgan's proprietary blockchain platform.

Earlier in 2016, ICICI Bank had successfully executed transaction in international trade finance and remittances by making use of blockchain technology in partnership with Emirates NBD, a famous Dubai based bank. Notably, it was India’s first banking transactions on blockchain.

Launched as a pilot in 2017, IIN is powered by Quorum, a permissioned (closed ecosystem) variant of the Ethereum blockchain, developed by J.P. Morgan. Quorum’s focus on privacy enables secure data sharing via IIN.

We saw tremendous interest among correspondent banks after the pilot launched in 2017, asking if they could join,” said Emma Loftus, Head of Global Payments and Receivables, J.P. Morgan Treasury Services. “We believe IIN will significantly improve the efficiency of cross-border payments, particularly as more banks participate and we evolve the functionality and use cases beyond compliance-related inquiries.”

The expanded network of banks will facilitate global cross-border payments in every major market, including Latin America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Quorum, which is an enterprise-focused version of Ethereum, is ideal for any application requiring high speed and high throughput processing of private transactions within a permissioned group of known participants.

With Quorum, IIN minimizes friction in the global payments process, enabling payments to reach beneficiaries faster and with fewer steps. Using blockchain technology, IIN reduces the time correspondent banks currently spend responding to compliance and other data-related inquiries that delay payments.

It competes with legacy platforms such as SWIFT and new startups like Ripple. Notably, SWIFT itself is testing its own blockchain-based solution and had successfully tested initial sandbox trials of blockchain-based proof of concept, in March this year.

Back in March, JP Morgan was considering making the Quorum platform a separate company, though retaining a stake in the venture, in order to drive its adoption to wider markets. It appears that this has yet to happen.