Blockchain manages Oil Company Bank Guarantee

“We are dealing with a lot of vendors and intermediaries, to source the crude. Similarly, we are dealing with numerous customers, wherein we have to provide a lot of product certificates. We also deal with many banks. Of course, many of these parties are untrusted and this is where blockchain can have a use case in making the processes transparent and trustworthy. But, on-boarding every stakeholder onto the blockchain will be a challenging process.”

Alok Khanna, Executive Director

At Indian Oil, the current bank guarantee process was completely paper based.  There is a critical path for Oil & Gas industry across 3 parties:

1. Customer (Multiple entities from Oil & Gas releases tenders)
2. Vendors (Multiple vendos apply for various tenders)
3. Banks (Multiple public-sector Banks can create bank guarantees)

There are numerous discrepancies due to errors/frauds are often found after the hard copies are processed, where corrections (invoke, amend or return) takes time and it becomes pressing issues around when the bank guarantee expiries.

Blockchain acts as an immutable record of every transactions which maintained in the Public Ledger of each party using Oracle Blockchain

• Convert current bank guarantee process to electronic instead of manual, paper-based to reduce discrepancies due to errors/fraud
• Reduce counterfeit bank guarantees which saves money for Indian Oil
• Speed processing times and provide a process for tracking across all parties involved
• Reduction of loss from counterfeit bank guarantees
• Shorter lead time of payment
• Introduction of a non-repudiation process with provenance and traceability for fast resolution of any conflicts

The Original process:

• Original Bank Guarantee process was paper based and manual
• Beneficiaries are dependent on the Vendor for interactions with the Banks–Lack of transparency between all parties leads to  discrepancies
  • Potential tampering requires extra verification
  • Lack of tracking complicates amending or invoking
• Significant manual effort, cost, and delays

This is a Pilot Project