Blockchain-based Invoice Factoring: from business requirements to commitments

Europe has the largest global invoice factoring market for over 1.6BEuro. The purpose of a factoring market is to address delay in payments of commercial invoices by buyers of good and services: sellers bring their still-to-be-paid invoices to financial organizations (factors) which provides an advance payment. The market further growth is hampered by a number of security issues such as the impossibility of factors to check whether an invoice has been already factored (double pledging). A global organization collecting all factored invoices could be a solution but all stakeholders (banks, factors, etc.) have various reasons to not wanting to share such data. In this scenario a distributed, blockchain-based implementation is the only way forward, We describe the security requirements and all key operations for a secure, fully distributed Invoice Factoring Market, hereafter referred to as simply the 'Market'. Our distributed, asynchronous protocol simulates the centralized functionality ...