As announced on Tuesday, Mastercard has entered a consortium called Marco Polo, which is working towards simplifying global trade with the help of blockchain technology. 

Mastercard Track, the business-to-business global trade system by the payments giant, will enable an access point to the working capital finance platform by Marco Polo, which runs within a $1.5 trillion market, as per the estimation by the World Trade Organization.

Marco Polo was founded by the start-ups TradeIX and R3. It implements the former’s Corda blockchain platform. The network guarantees greater visibility for trading relationships, real-time connectivity, and reduces barriers to accessing capital.

Since its launch in 2017, the network has caught the eye of various major financial organizations such as ING, BNP, and Commerzbank. Currently, it has over 25 client members.

Mastercard Track was built with the cloud service by Microsoft’s Azure, and was released in 2018. The platform provides with vetting, identifying, and onboarding services for over 210 million registered entities globally.

“The scale and reach of Mastercard will complement and enable the large number of financial service providers who have pioneered the formation of the Marco Polo network over the past couple of years,” a managing director at TradeIX, Daniel Cotti, said in a press release.

Even though its still in its initial phase, Marco Polo has gradually been launching trade transaction services for its clients. In August 2019, a third party precipitated a real-time payment to a supplier as the goods shipped for their destination.