Blockchain, big data and the value of global trade

Most data turns out to have a greater value than the sum of the parts. There's a story about a global courier firm that said it saw a large drop off in its monthly orders at some point in 2007, not too long before the bottom fell out of the global economy. Traditional economic forecasting did not see an issue, but had there been some visibility into trade finance data at that time it would have shown many contracts had been cancelled, affording us some warning of what was ahead. Macro-economic forecasters and statistical analysts know that trade data provides the most precise window into the global economy there is. Trade finance data has always been a notoriously opaque part in the supply chain, but we are now seeing end-to-end digitisation, as a multitude of banks and software providers test out trade/supply blockchains and other digital platforms.