Vinturas announced that it has received a €2 million grant from the European Union for the use of the blockchain in the automotive sector.
The funding was granted for the key contribution made to the EU’s sustainability and digitalization objectives through an innovative use of blockchain technology to bring full transparency to the automotive supply chain of new and used vehicles.
The grant comes from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and is issued through the North Netherlands Cooperation Association (SNN) with the aim of accelerating the digital management of millions of vehicles in Europe.
Vinturas is a European consortium of leading automotive logistics services companies including Axess Logistics (Scandinavia), Autolink Group (Baltic States, Finland, Russia and CIS countries), Groupe CAT (France, Europe, South America), Koopman Logistics Group (Netherlands and Germany) and National Vehicle Distribution NVD (Ireland and UK), and in 2019 they developed a blockchain-based digital platform for the transport of finished vehicles in Europe.
The consortium’s partners also include IBM, for the technology side, and Grant Thornton, as an advisor.
The aim is to standardize digital processes for finished vehicles in the automotive industry, raising the level of digitalization of the sector which is still very low. For example, paper documents are still widely used in this sector, while the Vinturas platform is based on end-to-end track&trace functionality that allows complete tracking of vehicles on the logistics chain from start to finish.
In this way, dealers can, for example, provide their customers with better information about the delivery times of new vehicles, giving them full real-time visibility of the entire supply chain.
The company’s CEO, Jon Kuiper, commented:
“This financing confirms the importance of the Vinturas platform in achieving transparency in the supply chain from factory to dealer, which also includes all movements for the transport of used vehicles within Europe. In this way, we are contributing to the European agenda related to innovation, digitalization and sustainability. Besides acknowledging our efforts, this grant will enable us to speed up the development of new digital applications to create added value for our customers. The issuance of an international electronic waybill (e-CMR) will eliminate millions of paper documents, for example”.
