A. General Information
bConnect
B. Lessons Learned
bConnect platform begins to be used by Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay to ensure more agility and security in the exchange of information on foreign trade. bConnect is a tool that allows the network sharing of registration information of companies certified by the Federal Revenue Service as an Authorized Economic Operator (OAS) and that enjoy benefits such as facilitation of customs procedures, both in Brazil and abroad.
bConnect was created to supply an international need of automated exchange of customs data of the OAS between the countries, that, before, was made, in its majority, by means of spreadsheets elaborated or extracted from the system that each country had and sent by electronic mail
The bConnect network begins by allowing the sharing of information from Authorized Economic Operators (AEO) and there are already plans to increase the network to meet the sharing of information from Customs Declarations.
the bConnect solution was developed using the Hyperledger Fabric 1.4 framework, an open source application maintained by The Linux Foundation.
The solution should adopt the WCO data model. Furthermore, it should be fully distributed so that the service is not hosted in just one country.
Data flows through an encrypted tunneling channel, between countries and according to the respective agreement.
The bConnect project consists of a permissioned blockchain implementation (Hyperledger fabric) that allows any type of data to be exchanged between participating countries. It is a Mercosur project, but it allows both the exchange of data between all countries and the bilateral exchange between some of them, and also the exchange of data with other countries that may adopt this tool.
AEO data exchange
Customs declarations
At the beginning of the project, there was a great lack of professionals qualified to implement Blockchain projects. In addition, the specific characteristics of this technology required some adjustments between the countries involved.
The use of blockchain allowed us to have a data exchange tool that, unlike the models we used until then, does not require the figure of a central server and also facilitates the management of data security and auditing.
Blockchain platform is very suitable for sharing logistic events and documents among all parties in supply chains
Facilitation of customs procedures
Data protection and consistency
We are studying other data exchange cases for use with this tool. We are currently finalizing the data exchange of some auxiliary tables of the international land traffic control system. Furthermore, the issue of interoperability between established blockchains on different platforms is also on our radar.
https://www.ibm.com/topics/hyperledger
C. Relevant Standards
Bilateral agreement between Uruguay and Argentina