Domestic freight foreign exchange payment scenario launched

This article was originally published by: Liberation Daily

Zhang Yang

News Report (Reporter: Zhang Yang) On April 1, the Shanghai Branch of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange officially launched the cross-border financial services platform “Onshore Freight FX Payment Facilitation” application scenario.

As an international trade and shipping center, Shanghai is home to a large concentration of international freight forwarding companies, and demand for onshore freight foreign exchange payment services is frequent. However, for a long time, onshore freight foreign exchange payment services have faced issues such as difficult invoice verification and high risks of duplicate payments. When companies handle such business, they need to submit a large number of paper or electronic invoices to banks as proof of authenticity. Banks, in turn, must invest significant manpower and resources to manually verify the authenticity of each invoice, which not only makes the process cumbersome and time-consuming, but also carries potential risks such as electronic invoices being reused and duplicate foreign exchange remittances being made.

The launch of the “Onshore Freight FX Payment Facilitation” application scenario is precisely intended to address these industry pain points in a targeted way. By integrating the invoice data of the Shanghai Municipal Taxation Bureau through the aviation and maritime blockchain network, this scenario enables online automated authenticity verification of ocean freight invoice information and precise verification of cases of duplicate usage, and also facilitates trusted cross-bank recognition of remittance payment data.

Banks can use the platform to query invoice authenticity with a single click, and all processes can be completed online. At the same time, the platform has an invoice annotation (endorsement) function, which can effectively prevent the same invoice from being used again for FX remittances. A platform based on blockchain technology also ensures that the data are real, reliable, and tamper-resistant.

On the same day, under the guidance of the Shanghai Branch of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, several pilot banks, including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Shanghai Branch and Agricultural Bank of China Shanghai Branch, successfully handled the first batch of “Onshore Freight FX Payment Facilitation” business.

In the past, when companies办理相关 remittances, they often had to prepare materials such as value-added tax invoices in advance for 1 to 2 business days. That day, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Shanghai Branch completed the verification and remittance process end-to-end on the platform in less than 10 minutes, greatly improving settlement efficiency and noticeably accelerating the speed of fund turnover.