Financial Twin Chain, a Platform to Support Financial Sustainability in Supply Chains
Giuseppe Galante, Christiancarmine Esposito, Pietro Catalano, Salvatore Moscariello, Pasquale Perillo, Pietro D'Ambrosio, Angelo Ciaramella, Michele Di Capua
TL;DR
The paper tackles the challenge of financial sustainability in supply chains by proposing a pluggable platform that integrates a live digital twin, permissioned blockchain with smart contracts, a semantic knowledge graph, AI-driven risk prediction, and a fintech service portal to monitor and mitigate liquidity and credit risks. It details a holistic methodology connecting big data, semantic enrichment, and digital twin concepts, enabling external actors to participate and inject liquidity. A securitization case study illustrates how assets can be securitized via SPVs and ABS to improve liquidity while distributing risk. The architecture aims to enhance transparency, trust, and access to financing across diverse stakeholders, offering a scalable framework for advanced SCF innovations in varying supply chain contexts.
Abstract
The financial sustainability of a generic supply chain is a complex problem, which can be addressed through detailed monitoring of financial operations deriving from stakeholder interrelationships and consequent analysis of these financial data to compute the relative economic indicators. This allows the identification of specific fintech tools that can be selected to mitigate financial risks. The intention is to retrieve the financial transactions and private information of stakeholders involved in the supply chain to construct a knowledge base and a digital twin representation that can be used to visualize, analyze, and mitigate the issues associated with the financial sustainability of the chain. We propose a software platform that employs key enabling technologies, including AI, blockchain, knowledge graph, and others, opportunely coordinated to address the financial sustainability problem affecting single stakeholders and the entire supply chain. This platform allows for the involvement of external entities that can help stakeholders or the whole supply chain to solve financial sustainability problems through economic interventions. Moreover, introducing these entities enables stakeholders less well-positioned in the market to access financial services offered by credit institutions, utilising the supply chain's internal information as evidence of its reliability. To validate the proposed idea, a case study will be presented analyzing the financial instrument of securitization.