Buzzword bingo alert:
"The initial development phase involves creating standard trade finance smart contracts on a distributed ledger infrastructure. This provides secure and automated financing of supply chain using a single record for critical trade data including identities, purchase orders, invoices, shipping and logistics information, trade assets, financing activity, credit risk, and more. Following this phase, R3 and TradeIX will engage the broader ecosystem, expanding services and onboarding additional members."
I note the inclusion of 'identities' in this announcement. This opens up both a VRMy vision of user-initiated transactions that a user could track through the supply chain for validating preferences, be they fair trade, country avoidance, lowest cost etc. That's if the supply chain places the user/customer at the centre. i.e. Not likely when implemented by banks and trade organizations. A more likely scenario is user tracking, targetting, exploitation, and surveillance. This will be the case even if the end user has full visibility of their order. Unless and until the power imbalance created by centralized pools of capital and individual customers, even self-sovereign identities can be subjected to this kind of exploitation.