Arqit are the UK company behind QuantumCloud™, which enables organisations to simplify and strengthen their encryption on a global basis, appliance free. Using this technology, they were looking to revolutionise supply chain finance.
The Challenge
Dr Barry Childe, co-founder and CIO of Arqit UK, contacted us in July 2022 looking for help in creating a new financial product offering for supply chain finance (SCF). It was an exceptional challenge with an aggressive timeline — an MVP was needed by the end of the year.
Creating new, digitally-native financial instruments, based on some of the oldest paper instruments known was ambitious to say the least. We’d need to engineer the product using blockchain and proprietary Arqit quantum-safe encryption technologies. And we needed to create a software platform that would allow users in SCF to create, adopt, use and eventually trade these instruments.
The Solution
We start each and every one of our projects with a Discovery phase. This enables us to make sure we have a common understanding and purpose — and that we agree on both the challenge and the opportunity. It helps us to tease out requirements, build understanding and let the shape of the solution begin to emerge before diving into design explorations.
Since no one has ever created a platform for the quantum-safe distribution and management of digitally-native instruments before, the design phase was comprehensive. We needed to define the identity, naming, brand concept and UI without having any predecessors to learn from. Luckily, we have well-defined and tested processes that allowed us to move quickly from our initial sketches to a final, elegant UI of TradeSecure™— the future of supply chain finance.
Next began the collaborative creation of schemas and technical architectures as we developed the solution iteratively in a complex fullstack technology effort.
It was an ambitious project from start to finish. But we still hit every single deadline on time, from PoC to MVP.
The Outcome
The TradeSecure™ platform we helped develop will accelerate and optimise supply chain finance across Europe and beyond. Not only will this save time and money for many, but it will open up the world to the benefits of secure, quantum-safe digitally-native financial instruments.
And we’re delighted to have taken part in bringing the first production-ready version of the platform to life.