European Investment Fund Investigating Use of Baseline Protocol for Digital Transformation

April 5th, 2022 – Unibright presents the study commissioned by the European Investment Fund (EIF), on how the usage of the Baseline Protocol could improve the EIF’s design of an EU-wide Intermediated Financing Platform (IFP).

The Baseline Protocol is an open source project and standards body, governed by OASIS Open standards body under the EEA Community Projects program. The protocol outlines the pattern to enable multi-party coordination of business processes with shared data attributes in a verified state of consistency that keeps the sensitive data static in respective enterprises’ systems of record.

The EIF has been pursuing digital transformation efforts to improve their provision of services to clients and support innovation – namely through financing small to medium enterprises (SME’s). To address this need, the Baseline Protocol is being investigated by the EIF as a pattern which provides great benefit by refactoring partially uncoordinated process steps between multiple parties into a verifiably correct and synchronized workflow based solution. The baseline pattern is intended to simplify the coordination required to provide financing to SMEs, which would normally be reliant on manual coordination of emails, file attachments, and logs.

The use case presented in the study centers on Finspot, a fintech company that must apply for and receive investment funds from the EU through the EIF’s Intermediated Financing Platform to be able to quickly achieve their business objectives. The proof of concept shown in the study that utilizes SAP, ConUBC, Baseledger, and the Finspot Platform shows an example implementation architecture for how baselined processes can be achieved on the IFP. With the Baseline Protocol, the accreditation and fund request “workflows” can be automated and synchronized on the IFP between an enterprise and the parties they rely on coordinating with to receive funding, such as the EIF, mandators, banks, and auditors.

The study breaks down the individual components of the Baseline Protocol within the scope of the EIF POC, to highlight their added value, implementation effort, necessity, and technical implementation details. The study concludes that the benefits of the Baseline Protocol are inherent in later phases of baselined processes, where recurring coordination takes place. The study additionally highlights the baseline pattern’s support for automation, scaling potential, and inclusion of third parties without putting any of the applicant’s information at risk of being exposed to an unintended use.

This report is another example of the increasing interest various organizations and companies have for the Baseline Protocol. Enterprises within regulated industries like finance have particular use of the Baseline Protocol, where digitized collaboration cannot come at the expense of sharing sensitive information. The protocol offers a bright future for companies to collaborate outside of platforms suspected of being data collectors as centralized platforms currently are. As more companies redesign their systems to participate in the increasingly intertwined global economy, they benefit greatly from the flexibility the protocol provides in how it can be implemented across existing infrastructure.

To read the full study, click here.

Learn more by following the Baseline Protocol on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Youtube. Full details can be found at baseline-protocol.org.

Written by Mark Rymsza - Baseline Protocol Core Developer & Outreach Team Member

Product Developer @ Consensys Mesh