PILA (Vietnam technology company) and TOTM Technologies (Singapore) have officially signed a Memorandum of Understanding on cooperation (MOU) to develop cross-border digital trust infrastructure for the ASEAN region.
The cooperation aims to build a reliable digital verification platform for cross-border transactions, thereby promoting digital commerce, reducing verification costs and strengthening trust between businesses, financial institutions and management agencies.
In the initial phase, PILA and TOTM Technologies announced a cooperation to deploy a pilot model applying Digital Certificates (VC) as a digital trust layer to supplement the L/C process between Vietnamese and Singaporean banks.
Credit Letter (L/C) verification faster, more independent and anti-counterfeiting
Credit letters (L/C) are one of the most common and important payment methods in international trade. But to verify a L/C issued by a foreign bank, banks still have to call, look up through SWIFT and compare documents back and forth, leading to multi-step procedures, lasting many days, incurring costs and potential risks of errors or forgery.
On that basis, the two parties develop a solution that is a digital authentication layer running parallel to the L/C. According to the new model, the bank still issues and processes the L/C exactly as it is now. In parallel, the issuing bank issues an additional VC certifying the authenticity of that L/C.
When the information is transferred to a partner bank, the recipient only needs to compare VC with a reliable infrastructure to immediately check the issuance source, ensuring the integrity of the information...
The core point of the solution is that the authentication party does not need to connect directly to the issuer. Trust comes from the common infrastructure, so verification takes place independently, immediately and does not depend on bilateral relations between the two banks.
Diametric two-way operating model. Accordingly, Vietnamese banks issue VCs authenticated by Singaporean banks on infrastructure in Vietnam; and vice versa, VCs issued by Singaporean banks are authenticated by Vietnamese banks on infrastructure in Singapore.
This solution aims to shorten the authentication time of documents, reduce manual cross-checking and form a network of many banks in Vietnam and Singapore that trust each other on a common infrastructure in cross-border transactions.
Towards a common digital trust network in ASEAN
On the basis of the reliable infrastructure established from this stage, the two sides will continue to expand cooperation to many other fields with other countries in the ASEAN region.
A key direction is Digital Passports for goods to help businesses with import and export activities between Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia meet the requirements for tracing the origin of goods in international markets.
In addition, the two sides will focus on researching and developing cross-border payment infrastructure based on digital trust, starting from Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia before expanding to the entire ASEAN region.
