Bay of Plenty Regional Council’s commercial arm, Quayside Holdings, is among the new backers of digital trade platform TradeWindow. 

The platform developer raised $6.4 million selling convertible notes to new and existing investors.

The council unit, which owns a controlling stake in Port of Tauranga, has deep ties into transport and logistics through the port's stakes in Timaru’s PrimePort, NorthPort, Coda Logistics, and online cargo management business PortConnect. 

ASB Bank owns 22.3 percent of TradeWindow and led the capital raising. The Rae family of Perth, which owned Gull until they sold it to Caltex Australia, and the Wiltshire family which owns the Wiltshire Property Group on Auckland’s North Shore, also participated. 

TradeWindow accepted oversubscriptions having initially sought $5 million. It will use the funds to accelerate its push across the Tasman, where it has operations in Melbourne and Brisbane. 

The company plans to base some of its senior management in Sydney early next year, having already had its foray across the Tasman disrupted by the covid-19 lockdown in Victoria. 

“The company has found the Australian government to be very supportive of increased digitisation of export trade,” it said. 

Gains 

Chief executive AJ Smith said he was pleased with how the company traded this year, with greater use of its export documentation service and systems for issuing certificates of origin. 

TradeWindow has been admitted into the SWIFT international banking network and plans to have its systems SWIFT-capable within a year.

“The past year has seen the company further the commercialisation of solutions that fulfill the promises of distributed ledger/blockchain for security and traceability, which have been talked about for a long time,” Smith said.

Fonterra, whose Kotahi joint venture has a strategic alliance with the Tauranga port, pulled off the first successful blockchain trade transaction into China earlier this year. This illustrated the value of shedding paper by cutting the processing time to less than 24 hours from the usual 10 days.