We spent the first six weeks proving that hypothesis with a working prototype rather than a deck. Together with the Secro founding team we ran a focused discovery, mapped the document lifecycle across carriers, banks, traders and insurers, and validated the technical choices on real trade scenarios. By the end of week eight we had a clickable prototype, a private blockchain backbone in place, and a 40-week MVP roadmap that everyone in the room could defend.
Fully digital Bills of Lading, Letters of Credit and Letters of Indemnity
Each document is issued, transferred, endorsed and finalised inside the platform. Letters of Indemnity, traditionally used to bridge missing paper documents, are eliminated entirely by the platform’s title-transfer mechanics.
A private blockchain underneath, hidden from users
Document fingerprints, ownership transitions and timestamps are anchored on a private blockchain. Original document data stays encrypted off-chain. Verification is cryptographic. Operators see only a clean web interface.
The Specific Secro Gateway middleware
Most trade-flow systems already in place are decades old. The Gateway translates between EDI, REST and file-based handoffs and Secro’s API, making adoption inside Oldendorff, Odfjell and similar operators practical rather than theoretical.
Customisable workflows
A low-code engine lets each customer map their trade reality to the system. Guided screens walk every counterparty through their step with full audit visibility.
Real-time visibility and data-driven decisioning
Every party sees one live state of the document. Historical transaction data is structured for analytics, so financiers can make faster, evidence-based credit decisions.
……
Solution
Solution architecture and private blockchain backbone
We designed Secro on a private, permissioned blockchain network with full off-chain encryption for sensitive payloads. Documents are tokenised on chain so they can be transferred atomically between counterparties, but the underlying business data lives off chain, encrypted, and accessible only to the parties to the trade. The result is tamper-evident finality without sacrificing privacy, which is the standard maritime trade has always demanded but rarely achieved. The architecture supports the full lifecycle of a negotiable document. Issuance, endorsement, transfer, presentation, surrender. Each step is signed, timestamped and cryptographically linked, so a bill of lading on the Secro platform can be verified by any party at any time without trusting a central intermediary.
Specific Secro Gateway middleware
The single biggest risk to a platform like Secro is adoption. Trading houses, carriers and banks do not want to rip out their ERP, TMS or CMS. They want the new capability to drop in. We built the Specific Secro Gateway as a middleware layer that sits between the Secro platform and the customer’s existing systems. It exposes a small, well-defined integration surface, so a customer can route their existing document flows through Secro without reorganising their stack. This is the piece that turned Secro from interesting technology into we can onboard tomorrow for the first wave of customers.
Patented security and audit layer
Trade finance is heavily regulated and heavily audited. We built role-based access control, multi-party approval workflows, full encryption at rest and in transit, and an audit trail that is cryptographically anchored to the blockchain. Every state change in a document, every approval, every transfer is preserved and verifiable years after the trade closed.
The security model is independently certifiable and compatible with the ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 controls the maritime and finance industries expect from a system of record.
