After months of intense cooperation and development, Dutch software services provider unchain.io has successfully delivered a strategic finance application for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines utilising R3 Corda technology.
Unchain worked with the KLM Digital Studio – a 200-strong innovation lab meant to explore how new technologies like blockchain can enhance internal processes and potentially add new business models across KLM.
As a result of this exploration, and the hard work of the team at Unchain – KLM Finance has set out to use blockchain to handle the intercompany settlements process of KLM with its subsidiaries. The objective of Unchain was to help simplify the accounting process in a secure and efficient manner and they worked in close co-operation with the KLM team to provide the design and implementation of the settlement capability using R3’s Corda technology.
Dominique Vijverberg, innovation specialist at KLM Finance:
“After initial learnings in smaller projects with the Digital Studio, KLM Finance is happy to announce this project, which we see as strategic to simplify our financial processes and to set an example for future blockchain projects that are no longer ‘test’, but have real business impact.” Potential next steps in KLM’s journey to consortium thinking are connecting more subsidiaries to this distributed ledger-based ecosystem.
Jelle van der Ploeg, CTO at unchain.io said:
“Unchain’s mission is to provide organizations with solutions to simplify sharing data and transacting with their value chain. In the case of KLM, this means digitally transforming the settlement process with its subsidiaries. We’re extremely proud to work with KLM and R3 on this innovative project and look forward to further expanding the solution, offering value to KLM and its partners.”
The intercompany settlement application is built on R3’s blockchain platform called Corda. Cathy Minter, Chief Revenue Officer at R3, said:
“Key to Corda’s success is the vibrant and diverse ecosystem of CorDapps. We built Corda to make picking up Corda and developing on it as simple as possible for experienced developers and we actively support our developer community. Unchain’s pilot will open up developing on Corda to even more firms.”
Unchain.io helps organisations with understanding and exploring blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology
(DLT) as well as the design, development and deployment of blockchain/DLT based PoCs, pilots and production applications. Their multi-disciplinary team has been involved in designing, building and implementing 25+ blockchain PoCs/pilots/production applications for organisations in a wide range of different industries based on a variation of blockchain/DLT technologies.
Air France-KLM is the leading group in terms of international traffic on departure from Europe. It offers its customers access to a network covering 314 destinations in 116 countries thanks to Air France, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and Transavia. With a fleet of 548 aircraft in operation and 101.4 million passengers carried in 2018, Air France-KLM operates up to 2,300 daily flights, mainly from its hubs at Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Amsterdam-Schiphol. Air France-KLM is a member of the SkyTeam alliance which has 19 member airlines, offering customers access to a global network of over 14,500 daily flights to more than 1,150 destinations in more than 175 countries.
