Where have you been? Blockchain for tracking goods in trade

[Music] thank you daniel um and thanks everybody for uh joining this uh this session it's been it's been a year since our last conversation on some of the topics we're going to be uh approaching here today i am joined by rodolfo no pedro lopez uh belmonte uh ostenaud and matthew van neukirk and i hope i have pronounced all your names correctly um it's always a challenge with the the last names uh thanks thanks for joining us and uh let's start with a quick introduction as as we talked before i'm gonna be following the the the clockwise pattern of what i have here on my screen and i just realized that pattern changed uh so i have rodolfo uh starting then i have pedro gans and and then matt uh last uh so let's start with an introduction uh quick introduction of each of you uh starting with rodolfo and then going to pedro uh nahants right thanks alberto so yeah as you said the the order changed but myself i haven't changed since last year uh i'm still working at henkel so for those of you who don't know henkel it's a german-based company that's doing more or less 50 revenue and fast-moving consumer goods so in beauty care and laundry and home care and the other 50 of our revenues in the industrial adhesives area um so i'm the head of blockchain i've been the head of blockchain now for almost three years and as i said a second time joiner of this panel thank you pedro yes so good afternoon pedro lopez uh and i work for rismo international uh for many of you richmond might be not very well known as the company is not promoting it's not doing a lot of marketing themselves or ourselves but rizmo is the second luxury conglomerate in the in the world with the brands as iconic as such as cathy montblanc iwc panerai or bachelor constantine quite focused on on watchmaking but not only and myself i'm the blockchain tech lead at the company i work in close relationships with the brands and the innovation team in all the blockchain initiatives and i'm doing this working in the blockchain space personally a bit more but at the company since almost three years great thank you guys nice to meet you all i'm working for careful retailer in france but also nine countries in the world we are retaining food products mainly but also non-food and having some services i'm my head of merchandising and supply chain b2b uh platforms for global city of california and i was handling brock's blockchain program since 2018 for traceability mainly thank you guys for your turn yes hi uh i'm matthew i'm the co-founder and ceo of a company called settlement settlement is a blockchain platform as a service solution we started in 2016 myself in the blockchain space since around 2014. in a previous life before starting settlement i was a banker um and leading a blockchain or supporting a blockchain center of excellence focused on capital markets applications but after 10 years in the banking sector i did my time and decided to start settlement to make blockchain technologies more accessible for developers all right all right thank you very much feedback from some of you so if you're not speaking if you could put your phones on on mute um thank you so much for the introductions and uh let's start i'd like to start with a first question uh to to rodolfo uh you know we start with uh you know the title of the session on where have you been uh let's start with uh what change in blockchain uh from from last year from our last talk and the last event uh it looks like it's been 10 years kovit makes everything look so so much longer but uh what do you think changed uh in this one year and uh what happened to blockchain yeah i think i uh i would say there's from uh let's say overall market perspective i think we've gone through a couple of newer waves of hype so to speak i think there was a a discussion earlier in the ebc about ntfs and things like that which is i think on everybody's mind the last couple of weeks uh which i think always comes at least for us working in corporates always comes sideways into the discussion of oh now maybe we should once again look into blockchain and see why it's so cool i think overall in the market i have what i've seen is a lot of other as you said uh platforms coming in so smaller players bigger players trying to position themselves in the area of how they can provide better services to the to those of us trying to leverage a blockchain as a whole uh that would be at least my two takeaways from the last as you said covet here um more on the ankle perspective i think we've uh finished well last year in regards to where we wanted to be in our process of of trying to make sure that those um that we had already proof of concepts and pilots where we could say yes we can take them productive i think there i think the only challenges and i think we might uh touch upon that later on in the panel is how to go productive right i think now we're facing sca scale uh topics especially in regards to how do you grow your ecosystem that started very minimum at a minimum level uh to something that's really providing let's say value and return on investment of their approaches you're also finding let's say vendors who drop out all of a sudden and they said well you know maybe the left way was not the right way to go so maybe a little bit of the start of consolidation in the market i don't know but yes so now we're kind of dealing in the challenges of scaling up what we had maybe presented last time around great thank you pedro you're you're a mute better yes yes i realized that sorry about that yes i have a similar point of view as a robot also in in one year i think in my opinion the most remarkable thing is that i i see again the the the the will moving in terms of of uh defy i think uh it's moving quite a lot they are quite active with a lot of things in terms of non-defy maybe since the last year and a half i've seen the the the conversation like slowing down and i think now the trends start to uh to um build up again probably partially partially due to the to the nfp uh fever that we are living these days but yes i think i think it's very interesting because i have also the same feeling that the the dust is starting to settle um the some of the partners that we were seeing in the in the ecosystem a couple of years ago they are not anymore and the ones that are still here they have consolidated we can see that they are starting to uh to grow and from a corporate perspective and you know looking at our projects is the same they are growing we are industrialized in our our some of our projects and we see much more interest inside and outside and if i have to summarize i would say that blockchain is maturing in the last has matured a bit in the last year great grants yes i agree with with both of you sanitary crisis showed the importance of focusing on our values and in careful uh we have this uh this motto to be as a leader for fruit tran transition providing a good products to all of our consumers um i guess the public um realized that things that were taken for granted were not that easy supplying food in the stores was not easy so we had to focus on the core business but we also had in the equation um price and sustainability of the products we deliver so we focused on that we keep our blockchain program on food transition and food traceability to provide this quality information we focus on what really matters to maintain a good price and now the crisis is we hope uh passing we are trying to address new use cases right now mattering as you said thank you guys now uh pick up i think just maybe underscoring a couple of things that i've already said um gartner does uh surveys every year about um the percentage of pocs and research activities that are going into production and the study for 2019 and in 2020 now you see quite an evolution in the move from production sorry from pocs or research activities into production and so 2019 the number was five percent uh so very low the number of um pocs that would go into production uh same study in 2020 showed that um around 14 went into production uh so a 3x increase in the the propensity to move to production is is impressive for one year one year evolution and 2021 i expect it's going to be around 20 24 so i think the trend is going to continue um so i'm i'm let's say ambitious or optimistic about the move out of the lab and into production i guess i think a lot of companies are recognizing that you don't really prove the business case until you're using it in product in production so if and as a maturity if the technology is is improving is getting better and it's ready for production use so we're seeing that move out of the lab and into into production where blockchain starts to deliver real value um and i think the other the esg theme is is really accelerating within um with everything i would say but we do see a lot um let's say q3q4 last year and into this year that a lot of um organizations that we're talking to um whereas before they might have been focusing on you know gender new revenue generation and and or cost savings um esg is really coming on to the forefront as a driver for providing not just being able to to have sustainable practices or and things like that but to be able to provide evidence of that to be able to prove it immutably and uh like irrefutably that you've achieved something from an esg perspective this is where blockchain can add value last one is move to public chain um so i've seen a shift as well public chains and permissionless chains were kind of taboo especially in the banking sector uh previously but uh the the uh i i start to see signs last year that uh that that fear if i can call it that is is diminishing and um companies are becoming more open to looking at really decentralized public blockchains amazing uh thank you matt uh you touched a few of the a few of the topics that i would like to discuss further uh with you folks like the pocs also the the public versus the private uh ledgers and blockchains and uh but but now the question we we talked about nft we talked about a a few of the things that have been happening in this last one year uh is is there a trend at this point uh can we trace better where blockchain is going at least in the enterprise at this stage rodolfo on our perspective uh yes we've also kind of narrowed down the areas of work we've been uh doing so to speak i mean we i wouldn't probably would not surprise anybody but generally we're focusing on the areas of supply chain and and sustainability as well so this is i mean something i also heard from garands says despite the fact of all the chaos of the world that we are still trying to do uh responsible sourcing in that sense and i think the consumers also have not lost any interest in that area so so there's still quite a demand uh to go into the look into your raw materials into your uh let's say upstream supply chain partners and make sure things are going well what is your view of pedro on that where's blockchain going for richmond well on our side we we had a a first exploratory uh phase where one of the things we did was to think okay what do we do upstream downstream uh public private and we explored a bit we analyzed a bit we bet early on in general uh for the public blockchain and for the downstream especially i think it makes all the sense as soon as you are going to create a relationship with the customers and enhance it with blockchain it it does make sense to do it in a public way because it's current with the transparency and uh it follows a kind of current line or we want to uh to call it the the whole story makes sense right it doesn't make sense to use blockchain and to tell your customer this is your uh certificate your nft or whatever you are providing but you cannot check it by yourself um we also in the supply chain part we we we analyzed a bit and where while we see a lot of value in our case we thought that blockchain was not enough and as it's not enough in most of the cases that's probably one of the mistake of uh people entering into the world they they say or they think that blockchain is the the the golden ticket or the magic wand to solve all the problems it's just a part of the piece and you need to be smart of how to implement it and in our case we saw that we we were in the right in the right track but we needed to strengthen our supply chain and our relationship with with our providers before really putting something uh with doing something with blockchain in that regard so i think for us that's our future short medium long term i don't know but we will get there okay and for for car for uh guns for careful we rely on a private blockchain we decided because we know all the suppliers forming the 37 consortium we have live now um we decided to have a private blockchain to secure it but also to reduce energetic cost and maintain an echo tech because it's one of the concern when we talk about blockchain is to have a an energetic cost important so we had this um this solution but we opened it to the consumer using a single phase single page internet we are exposing the data in the blockchain through an api to the final consumer so we are dealing with this problem another way it's good it could be inspiring maybe in other use cases i as i said in supply chain use cases we will have to address a public blockchain however in in our future we are um it's a a near future because it's this month we are exploring interoperability with our blockchain and other blockchain um to to see if uh through standard apis we can share data and evo avoid uh rewriting reloading of data and we are quite confident it will work because we were based on standard of data but that's an important thing for us to maintain system standards and make sure we can have a secured but open system um that's an issue and if we see a a a more long-term future if we have more actors in the blockchain area we will have to maintain to mature uh blockchain and maybe anticipate some risk and some attack on the blockchain great matt and i i think i think maybe in the previous question i talked a little bit about future trends but i'll uh there's one that i think uh granolas mentions uh one that's really important that standards um let's say the if i look at the example of trade finance and what's happened in that over the past starting in 2015 already and you had uh in in the financial services sector the the enthusiasm about doing things at blockchain technology and trade finance and the result uh you know three four years later is that we have um let's say 15 or 20 prominent trade finance consortia that are operating across the world and they're they're all separate islands um so you have uh different trade finance solutions that are operating on chain using you know either using enterprise ethereum or using quarter using fabric whatever protocol they selected but now from from a user perspective that's not a financial institution that actually would look to getting a seamless journey for a ship going across all of these different islands of trade finances is not optimal um so it's kind of highlighting the need to create solutions for interoperability and that's the core of that is is standard so other things like iso and w3c standards for decentralized identities and the centralized identity foundation i think we're going to see a continuance and i guess in the in the early days it was just you know leave standards out because let us innovate you know standards kill innovation i think that that kind of a phase where we'll start to emerge from and um in the next couple years it'll be a big focus on having clear standards that uh enable interoperation between different blockchains because we're not going to end up with one blockchain uh they'll we'll live in a multi-blockchain future and uh that will require standards and interoperability thank you there's uh two questions from the audience here that don't like to get addressed uh one of them i think it's faster to for guerns to to answer and is there any solution developed at cariford today where you can have information of a product with qr code plus blockchain and i'll let you answer and i'll complement the answer because we are involved in some of that as well um any solution uh i don't where you can scan a qr code and trace through the blockchain it depends on the country you're in uh in france you can go for any stores looking for careful quality line products and if you're buying a chicken and some eggs some oranges some tomatoes this summer because it's seasonal products so you don't have them for now um cheese you have a camo bear you have vodka maduro you have chavigneal you have several products and since the beginning of the year you can also buy textile organic product you can have a bad linen sheets you can have also baby bodies um if you if you have some kids that's a range of products in in france if you're in other countries you have equivalent chickens in careful quality line brand there are almost blockchain in all our country eggs mostly some countries have put some blockchain on pork on fishies like um malus or salmon we have a range of product and as i said we have now 37 products we can i can put some some url in the chat so so you can have a look for instance on one chicken um i don't know if the audience has access to the same chat that we do i'll double check with daniel later but what we'll do is we'll try to share some of these links with the audience yeah so they can have access to this and and i can't compliment on that because we have some products nestle has some products there's trace on the blockchain they're sold by curry and there's a qr code and you can scan and uh you can get uh the supply chain information in there oh daniel just said he will share the link with uh that he put on the chat he would share with uh oh there you go a beer yeah it was a actually this this was one so qr code there's i sorry i ran off for a moment and they probably heard some noise of your bottles clanking but it was i wanted to show i'm glad you came prepared for the panel you're ready i'm drinking coffee here i feel yeah but it's the end of the day in europe so it's the beginning of the day for me and the other question we have from the audience for pedro uh has richmond explored the possibility of merging luxury brands with video games using blockchain technology or nft that's that's an interesting one well i i would say that uh that um first the there is a lot of hype uh now about nfts and uh i would say that not all nfts are built the same i think the hype now is focusing more on collectibles we have been applying nfts and creating energies since two years since the past two years for more focusing on authentication and on ownership right which is a big link to to uh to the question because in the end um what you need in order to put something on a virtual realm like a video game is is to to to at least guarantee the ownership of the of the item and certainly it's uh on on our bucket of ideas i couldn't say right now if uh if we will go sooner or later or ever but i think my personal opinion not my company my opinion my personal opinion is that we will go sooner or later and when i say will is not only rismo it's all the industry because certainly there is a lot of value there and i think is the right way or not the but one of the right ways to merge the current um use of nfps as collectibles with the usage that the industry has explored first in the shape of ownership certificates or tokens back to to product so why not to imagine a virtual version of of the product just going into some video game right i'm going to be the gamer myself so i i would personally even like to uh to see something of that yeah it would be pretty cool to have uh one of your watches uh in fortnight indeed there are a lot of games in fortnite or or in in different games as well uh i i i would say that any online game right now should be susceptible to uh to have this kind of this kind of application uh another thing is that as a brand you need to see where you want to go what fits best your strategy but for me it's not a question of if it's a question of when amazing um rodolfo we we have been talking here some of the talks we talk about like different use of blockchains there's a private there's public uh permission based non-permission based um are there too many competing blockchains uh solution today what is the ideal number in the market have you have you thought about that no not really i think uh i think yeah i mean from from my perspective i think we had kind of some similar discussions uh in one of our projects which ran into some challenges uh because we were quite uh happy with the initial for example blockchain framework we decided for um and they're basically i think the uh from a corporate perspective you're still quite zeroed in on these private blockchains so i mean uh kind of kudos to to pedro and those who are uh who are able to use uh the public block blockchains and get uh partners on board for that uh perspective uh but for us it's really a really a no-go so so it does reduce a little bit the the universe of frameworks um and and even then you still have questions about you know uh so maybe what about corda or r3 and things like that um i think from my perspective at least during the last six to nine months it's more of a topic of how many vendors are out there i think if if i were to say today that i have a project and some budget to run a traceability project with blockchain here at the convention i'm sure i will have 100 or 200 even thousands of emails from companies who are specializing in this uh so it's getting quite uh those two this is an area where i would say yes it's quite muddled um and then most startups and big companies are searing and also on these uh use cases that are much common i would say also probably anti-counterfeit uh logistics tracking use some map i think you mentioned shipping that's also an area where there's plenty of things to go around so it's it's getting quite difficult to pick out the good ones from that bad ones um pedro uh what what about you uh on on on the same topic uh you know and and i think in in one of our previous conversations you did mention that you started with one ledger if i'm not mistaken with swisscom and then you switch to another one how many ledgers you're working with today and how many different solutions and where you see the market going oh we did we did a project a proof of concept with with swisscom and our brand panerai it's not very well known but it was public when we did it and it was at the same time as we started the project with basically constantino [Music] is another one of our brands the project is live today and and in the process of being industrialized so going to moving into a full production mode and um we decided to take different approaches for for both of them with version one we went with uh with a startup uh very focused on the use case uh aviani which was also set him up setting up a consortium an industry consortium which is was also very interesting for us and based on on an ethereum side chain right public side chain and uh and um yeah working with ethereum technology which for us was uh important um and i will get back to that uh in a minute because it's linked to uh one of the topics that matthew said before the other project was with swiss common and panerai with panerai we decided to take a similar approach but with more traditional shiscon blockchain they are really great guys this is a great project but it's not a focused startup such as they are more of a generic and they are doing different projects and quite successfully they did a very good project for us on top of hyperledged fabric right so private blockchain and and we after comparing the two projects we learned a lot and we realized that in that particular use case the the right way for uh for us to go was the public blockchain because the first is a bit more agile second you have the the value of the construction which is very important for us otherwise we would be building our own blockchain or maybe not even a blockchain maybe a database would be more than enough and and we are realized also that that having having the ethereum layer is providing um some standards to us and we realize on the standard points i wanted to point out i think they are very important and i also agree that the standard might kill a bit the innovation so what's the approach that we took we said okay we need a standard today so we choose a standard ethereum uh because it's the standard today it's what everyone is uh using for fungible and non-fungible tokens but we keep an open mind in the future so uh really we are ready to move if tomorrow another blockchain will arise that will replace ethereum as as standard or where we see more value for for us and for our customers in in this use case we are ready to move and we will move as quickly as we can while i have you on the spotlight pedro someone asked about a partner in richmond partnering with ariani and uh what does it bring to richmond uh what are the incentives for that and what does it bring to richmond as i said is the consortium and is the fact that they are uh a startup also focused on our sector so they are focused on on 35 and luxury goods and in the process of creating the the project the the interaction was very good at a very good level between both parties so uh the the our mission uh they had a pretty good idea but that was enriched with uh with the inputs from uh ariani and i think we created something uh very good which was the core of what what area is today we we build we help them build the consortium and the focus of the application together and that's what i say the incentive for us is that they are providing a lot of value they have been able to uh get on the same table different players in the in the industry and these conversations with our competitors around this specific use case i think is enriching and it's enriching each one of us because we share different points of view we share different perspectives and and we are able to gather around a common objective with the added value that then we have the flexibility to uh move ourselves the way we want with the solution because again is an open source protocol so we can enrich each one of us can enrich that solution with our own flows with our own uh specifications and with our own ideas or services for the customers interesting and you you touch the point of uh you know the really the network and the framework i think we're doleful touched on that point as well which is uh critical for blockchain when we talk about using different uh ledgers uh it's not necessarily about ledger a or b or c but what are the inter connection possibilities of that because blockchain is about distributed for uh on still on the same topic for garands uh there is a question here that someone raised on kahufu maintaining both its own blockchain and ibm uh food trust usage can you uh share a little bit more on that and also your views on you know the multiple blockchains uh available there and what is what is the role for kaifu um we we do maintain uh both platform our own made uh platform and and ift's platform uh we we had an inverse move from your pedro we started with ethereum in 2017 and we moved to a higher ledger fabric in 2018 because at this time it was more suitable for our purpose so everything is changing the the technology is maturing but it's still young we do not know what the future is made of so it's important to stay flexible and and keep this ability to to adapt um what's interesting for us is uh both our platform careful and ift are based on um hyperledger fabric we are trying to to maintain some standards even if we have some different innovation in one platform we can do some stuff in one platform we cannot do on the second one but that's no big deal because we try to adapt to our uh consumer need and it's not blockchain for blockchain it's blockchain for purpose and if the purpose is changing the blockchain is changing what can be interesting it's not uh i totally agree it's not a question of quantity of actors it's more a question of quality of the actors of quality of the protocol quality of the egg exchanges um we can have proprietary platforms as we have with cafo but it's an open one able to communicate with our ift platform and that's interesting to to maintain blockchain live in the future so that could be my my point of view for for for the maturity of the of the system and the number of factor competency is good if we can have good competition trying to improve quality and reduce price it will be all benefit for all of us and mainly for us for our consumer because if we just have 37 uh use cases for now it's because of the cost of the blockchain careful is paying for it it's not the supplier paying for the blockchain it's not the consumer so it's our self maintaining our business model if it's cheaper we can offer this transparency and success ability to more product meaning more consumers and that's a good thing thank you uh matt we talked a little bit on you know the the the different uh ledgers and blockchains what's your view on that and uh where you see this this going are we gonna have a blockchain to rule them all or uh we're gonna focus more on on standardizing data across the ledgers yeah and and from with us as a as a product company you know our approach is to stay agnostic um so we all of the the the different the leading enterprise blockchain protocols are all supported by the blog platform so if it was you know let's try it with this technology and then tomorrow let's try it with that one and then the day after or next week we say well it didn't really work with that protocol let's try it with this other one that's all possible so we we don't think that it makes sense to lock any anyone to a specific protocol um because the simple matter is or the simple fact is that there's not one blockchain that's best for everything and so we try to stay agnostic to to protocols and we've added in also the last year the the main net for ethereum and evaluating three other public uh blockchain uh protocols at the moment um so there's we wanna stay flexible so that uh providing optionality to users of our platform um so if if something changes and it's not compatible with the use case the business the business changes or the needs change then okay well i don't need to throw everything out i can keep using the same thing um so and so the first part is we say agnostic um and the second part uh so do we do i think there will be a blockchain well i guess the first part probably answers the second part and the short answer is no i don't think there will be one blockchain that rules them all um and what we do with our technology we have a layer in it for that can support interoperability between chains um so using the the kind of a cross chain pegging mechanism that enables for information reported and then to the final part an answer to the the answer to the final part it's it'll be more about then standardizing data formats than uh trying to force everything into one one-size-fits-all blockchain the other question from the audience for you people got interested in your beer if if there is any way you can actually uh show how this qr code of the beer work i don't know if you can show it here on the screen maybe or the other thing i was going to suggest you if you can take a picture of that qr code and uh paste it on the chat there we go let's see if we can read that so when i when i scan that qr code i'm taken to a website from from left and there i can um yeah i can do all kinds of stuff to engage with consumer they show recipes but when i want to see the provenance of the the beer itself um i click on show me the journey and when i do that it just takes a second it's coming up um so i can see i can see it now we can see you know there's the farmer uh farmer uh luis joffrey from uh from the north of france um and if i want to see how did this this what was the journey of the beer before i got it in my my shelf all of the the data throughout the supply chain is collected um and then i can at the end oops sorry went through it okay and that was when i get when it was bottled at the the bottling plant and then it was shipped to uh to the the warehouse into the uh to the to the shop so this one went live in january um and it was the north of france so the macro store six million bottles of lefa um with that qr code um there's so each feature you scan that can i make a suggestion yeah because probably not all audience has access to to that beer uh in their different uh countries if you could share a picture of that qr code and put on the chat uh then uh daniel can post this to to the audience to try it at home that would be they'll be interesting and um and then what i will do as well is uh i will share following this uh this panel i'll share with daniel a few qr codes from nestle products as well so people can get more familiar and how this traceability perhaps the hands you can do on uh from uh get some products from kaifu as well and people can trace and next year when we're we have this live and in person we'll share not just the qr codes but the products as well with that we'll drink them here that that would be awesome i'm looking forward for that um we've we've been talking uh you know part of our conversation has to do with you know we're talking about talks we're validating we're testing we're trying and we keep hearing about pox for for a while now it's been almost two years uh what is spock's and what is reality and connecting with another question from uh from the audience is how high is the priority of blockchain uh for product traceability in supply chain and how high overall is blockchain in terms of priority for hankel for example i think the first two are very good questions as you said in regards to the uh the topic of the pox because i think i was following the discussions of of garanz pedro and matt i said if you're starting to talk about standards and interoperability i think you're in a good stage it means probably that your pucks made sense they worked and that they're looking now to be to expand and scale um i think you keep hearing about pox because i think it takes a little while to get uh into the sweet spot uh what were you called of what a blockchain use case is really like uh and what i mean is that you have kind of two at least from us perspective what we have found is there are two variables you have to look at one of course is the business benefit or the return on investment uh so and they're basically what you would find and even has happened to us that you start a park in an area where you think it's very simple to do there might be a lot of not a lot of friction going in maybe you already know the partners and whatever but the return on investment that or the problem that it solves is really minimal so you might have a very successful poc technology has almost never been an issue for us but then when you look at the topic for the next investment then you then you have a you have to think okay so why isn't anybody coming in it's maybe not worthwhile to do it on this part we should have done it maybe on a on a on a problem that brings you more rev more return on investment so to speak and the second topic is sometimes you get that right and you say yes this is the area for example we want to trace materials on a supply chain perspective for our perspective there's a lot of focus on the sustainability angle in that sense and the ssu as matt showed on his app there's quite a lot of also consumer value and up sale benefits that you can uh quickly gain through that uh even if it's just through the marketing of the solution but hopefully more because people actually scan it and look at it but then you figured out you know what i started off maybe maybe too small in my ecosystem so now the issue is getting all the other members involved so i think i also i mean last year we had not garands but emmanuel uh representing kara4 and and for example i think it's a very wise decision to start off with the colorful line of products because then they're able to scale their ecosystem quite quickly and and in that sense for example then that that also helps you to grow to have this high priority topic pushed the right way a puck becoming a productive scenario and and then coming back to the end of the of the question so how high of a priority is for henkel i think it goes in line with the the problems to solve so if i looked at overall supply chain maybe in the areas where we still have some challenges in tracing where our products are along the supply chain is a good area where it's still high on the agenda of people's list uh especially as it's consumer-facing so maybe the downstream side of the supply chain and the other area as i said is in sustainability because i think that's part of our core values at henkel i think we do also a pretty good job from what we've learned in in in working with our uh sustainability stakeholders in the different lines of businesses so it's something very important for us to can make sure that we can certify that we are working sustainably and that we can offer that into the consumers for some of the other areas as i said we've had parks where we said we started maybe off on the wrong uh let's say on the very low value approach so then yes of course the priorities also go down as you work with any innovation pipeline great um for for richmond uh pedro uh how high in the priority list is blockchain and uh if you could assess today what is uh poc and what is reality uh for richmond how much more reality versus poc you have today versus prioritization i think uh i think uh we are in in in the moment of uh shifting or or to say it better we started uh one year ago in a moment of shifting so at the beginning of uh last year we realized that the technology and the the that was bringing us to uh was bringing value to us and that where our pocs were valid and and we decided to uh to move ahead so i would say that today even in the conversations that we have not only for the existing [Music] projects but even for new projects we are having a really long term uh view inherent in all our conversations because we have already validated the technology so now it's not a question of if the technology is valid for us is how we can apply it and if we are ready in in the different use cases to apply it and and i go back to the sample as i mentioned before of our supply chain that we saw we will it was not ready we were not ready in that site to include blockchain in our supply chain solutions so i think that's the approach now we are ready we are moving we are more and we have more and more interest and more and more initiatives and it's just a matter of uh fitting the the different pieces great uh uh i know you you have more reality than talks at this stage because you have the actual products out but uh do you see that shift and what is the priority uh that you see uh you know with with your management uh when it comes to blockchain um actually we have we are in real world for food and uh and textile traceability we made one park in our roles um traceability it was supporting the supply chain trace but we stopped that maybe we will relaunch some studies in in the supply chain area um so it's beginning we spoke and then it goes in reality world um for food traceability as i said it's reality the priority for us um now we are we had a phase in reality world uh testing and learning uh i i shared the chicken um queer code if you look for another product you will see some differences in the design in the data we traced because we were trying some stuff uh sometimes it was good sometimes it was not a better idea so we have a little bit of diversity now we are reducing and re rationalizating on um one unique design orders um that's the first thing the second part is now the technology and the business understand what we're doing we have to convince the consumer and they get some benefits because when you're shopping you have a lot of messages you have price you have music you have lights you have is the time running you have so many inter injunction in your mind when you're shopping then scanning a cure to to to get the traceability is not easy for everyone and it's not the purpose so we have to to focus on customer adoption first and we have to explore now new use cases maybe on supply chain maybe on sustainability maybe both combined in supply chain and sustainability but focus on customer adoption first for the the first use case for export matt uh you yeah maybe just a little bit continuing on what uh gerance was talking about like what we're seeing now is we've done some things with sustainability and and um and supply chain so that i'm flashing this package of beer and it seems like it's kind of a nice novel thing to do but uh the that implementation was fully driven by the sustainability department at abmev um so what they're they're looking to do is gather insights throughout the supply chain to identify you know they work with so many so many suppliers of at the farm level i think there was something like 50 000 farmers across europe um you know production um let's say output per um let's say ton of barley is different uh depending on the farmer so if they what they want to do is collect information throughout the supply chain not just at the farm level but throughout it and to see in which ways can they share best practices amongst such a large group of suppliers so that the ecological footprint of the um of the supply chain can be diminished and i learned a lot about the the brewing process but of course about the farming and agricultural side of things metrics like how deep is the soil tilled when they're planting that has an impact on yield um or you know what was the the angle of tilling all of these things apparently have impact on on output for a square or a let's say a cubic tonne of of of of barley so the the aim there is is is really about sustainability and um what we're working on now is another use case where it's sustainability supply chain and financing so how do you creating supply chain finance solutions where either the the purchaser if they're large enough that offers financing solutions to their own suppliers or financial institutions that get involved to provide working capital solutions for uh for smes for example that are supplying large companies but you know the crossover what i find interesting is like you know you start we started with one thing which was okay supply chain tracking and then sustainability is added to that as a driver uh and then another thing being added on top and you've got to you know financing uh that's you know preferential on the financing side it's you know giving um incorporating esg metrics into uh the the credit scoring model uh so that you know if i'm if i'm factoring an invoice as an sme that um you know if i have good scores and the goods that i'm producing are green um then i'll get um you know 90 96 cents on the dollar for my invoice um if i'm average i'll get 94 cents and if i'm my esg scores are low and the product that i'm producing is um is uh oil i don't know something like that then i get 92 cents on the dollar so what i'm finding interesting here is like the combination of use cases that actually drive can drive adoption and create incentives throughout the ecosystem whether it's an esg incentive or it's a better financing incentive but bringing more in growing the ecosys the the consortia to involve different dimensions of business is is will lead to much more adoption i think great um dear so i i like to see what i'm seeing here the questions from the audience they're on fire there's a ton of questions here i'm not sure we're going to be able to answer all these questions uh today but we'll uh during the the live session but certainly we'll touch those uh those those questions uh later on but uh i'm gonna try to connect a few of those here uh to help us uh there's people talking about you know do we have use case beyond tracking goods right and and i think that's uh that's my view it's it's a common misconception that uh people think that blockchain is about traceability traceability is one of the use cases and perhaps it was the use case that was like closer to blockchain but blockchain is mostly about trust and to give transparency to trust and and and that brings an additional value to the supply chain um rodolfo how do you see this and you do you have a similar concern when people think well it's only about supply chains it's only about traceability and what is the value of this traceability i would say that i agree fully that it's about the three t's so as you said traceability trust transparency definitely i think i would however not criticize anybody who is doing a traceability uh exercise or who wants to start there i think it's a what do you call these low hanging fruits so if you wanted to get started on your blockchain practice or really start seeing how that would work in your company that's definitely an area where to go as matt said yeah right you then you combine it with different things with financing with uh i don't know with audit uh compliance or something else in that sense um i i think as you said it's um i would somehow because we explored quite a bit of of the different fields when we started a couple of years ago the one area where i think it might make sense to still look at or maybe two areas if i can try to keep my answer short here uh is still in the area as a set of of financing and not necessarily of praying with crypto or things like that but in the processes that have to do with payment to providers or payment to customers in that sense it's much it's they don't really care where the product is that it's more about the flow of money and who has kind of cust who can provide let's say proof that something was uh charged correctly so to speak uh there's quite a lot of money uh in some of these processes of our money to be collected uh because it's on dispute and i think or promotions that are not you know there are not really trustworthy from from the different let's say uh partners that you might have them so that's an area that could be explored and it's definitely not about traceability uh and i think the other area it's about a little bit more on audit compliance but i would maybe move it away from where uh if my product crossed borders correctly to to areas which are not explored like for example in human resources so i could say today that i am a graduate of mit and i might be able to get something from uh from a you know a black market area to say that i am certified to do that uh however as i think a solution like blockchain could definitely certify education i think also for me coming from a developing country it was always i mean it's not always that they know your university uh so so it would make it very easy to say hey this is an existing university has a certain amount of prestige this is the let's say the uh the valid certificate so dear company multinational or whatever uh hire these kinds of people and i think these are areas that as i said don't have anything to do with traceability but do provide trust and i think i said they also provide transparency that's the the three t's and uh that's that's that's a way to to connect with consumers as well because that's what people are looking for transparency and and brands that they can trust and i think that blockchain also connects uh the consumers with the smaller players because it levels the playing field you know you can all of the sudden have have access to uh to this uh list of uh you know of transactions and who is buying from whom and uh can i trust this guy can i trust this other vendor this other supplier uh that enables possibilities that people don't have today and you also touched another topic that i'm particularly fond of on blockchain of them we'll try to uh answer uh them following up um after this this panel and uh i see that daniel is is back on on the stage with us um dana what's next now thank you alberto and thank you all for for finding one hour of your busy calendars to be here with us i look forward matthew to next year event because i'm sure we'll have those beers or this year no i think next year right you