AP Moller - Maersk (MAERSKb.CO) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) have recently announced their intent to establish a joint venture to provide more efficient and secure methods for conducting global trade using blockchain technology.

Traditional cross-border shipping processes usually involve manually transporting and verifying paper documents for each shipment. IBM and Maersk are forming a joint venture to use blockchain technology to make global trade more efficient, transparent and secure.

The aim of the new company will be to offer a jointly developed global trade digitization platform built on open standards and designed for use by the entire global shipping ecosystem. It will address the need to provide more transparency and simplicity in the movement of goods across borders and trading zones.

Blockchain technology is ideally suited to large networks of disparate partners. A distributed ledger technology, blockchain establishes a shared, immutable record of all the transactions that take place within a network and then enables permissioned parties access to trusted data in real time. By applying the technology to digitize global trade processes, a new form of command and consent can be introduced into the flow of information, empowering multiple trading partners to collaborate and establishing a single shared view of a transaction without compromising details, privacy or confidentiality.