Trust has always been a major part of what makes trade possible. The international trading system has come a long way, and today we have technologies that have the potential to allow all parties in a supply chain to trust each other with fewer intermediaries and costly documentation.

To assess how businesses could leverage these technologies, the CommBank Innovation Lab and a team of bankers, trade specialists and tech experts came together for an experiment we call Trade-chain.

After identifying what the industry could improve and how, we built and tested a platform that traced a shipment of almonds from regional Victoria, through the rail network, onto a ship at the Port of Melbourne and across the seas to Hamburg, Germany.

The journey of these almonds transformed the way we think about logistics.