A consortium of banks, including BNP Paribas, Citibank, HSBC, and Standard Chartered, launched the Contour trade finance platform on October 5. 

• Contour is a blockchain-based trade finance platform that digitizes processes across a variety of assets, including commodities, petrochemicals, energy, metals, retail goods and textiles
• HSBC tweeted about the "decentralized" platform, which is built on R3's Corda permissioned blockchain technology
• The community is largely amused by the decentralized label, and question how the platform is decentralized; others are appreciative of the fact that the technology is being adopted
• The platform has been in beta since January 2020, and is now a standalone entity
• Results have shown a 90% reduction in processing times, bringing end-to-end times down from an average of 10 days to under 24 hours 
• The eight banks that are behind Contour are Bangkok Bank, BNP Paribas, Citibank, CTBC, HSBC, ING, SEB and Standard Chartered
• Contour has been in the works for years, originally existing as Voltron on R3’s Corda in 2017, and has conducted several experiments and pilots since