Creating a Chain of Custody

 Today’s dynamic environment, that is so increasingly dependent on authenticity and traceability of data held in disparate locations, is driving the need for these solutions.

A chain of custody platform recognises and resolves a large performance gap in legacy trust systems at the point where secure documents and artefacts meet data archives.

Banks, law firms, healthcare providers, manufacturers, energy producers, transport companies and government agencies are now able to verify in real time the authenticity of secure documents by directly linking them to their respective secure transactions in real time.  The creation of a chain of custody platform has resolved the requirement to link the physical world to the logical world in real time.

Large enterprises throughout the EU are confronted with document management costs that generate over €150B per year of direct overhead for companies with over 1000 employees (according to a recent Ricoh study).

Unfortunately, it is also estimated that over 50% of this paper mountain does nothing to enhance corporate performance. 

A chain of custody platform and service provides the backbone of immutable trust to the four fundamental elements of transactions: Artefact, Activity, Asset and Archive.  New services provide answers to important business process and performance questions including: How can we authenticate the provenance and chain of custody of the:

·      Artefact used by all parties to manage a transactional process?

·      Identity of the holder of the Artefact?

·      Activity that is the reason for undertaking a transactional process?

·      Asset upon which a transaction is based?

·      Archive upon which a transaction is based?

How can we synchronize and validate all these elements (artefact, holder, activity, asset, archive) in real time and before progressing to finality?

A chain of custody portal aggregates the answers to all these key business performance questions on a single platform with distributed ledger technology (DLT) immutability driven by a Plug Infrastructure.

Traditional legacy trust systems cannot answer these questions with sufficient guarantee of immutability, and certainly not in real time.  Therefore, legacy trust and legal “finality” are rife with risks: financial, reputational and legal. The ‘4Trust Chain of Custody’ platform, which was launched in the UK by The TALL Group of Companies in July, provides two essential, industry-unique capabilities:

·      Creates a singular, cloud-based domain integrating physical and virtual worlds in a seamless chain of custody;

·      Provides real-time links between physical and electronic multi-schema artefacts (e.g., documents, contracts, emails, certifications and titles, purchase agreements, liens, as well as, product parts, controlled items etc.) and their associated processes to a DLT archive, which confirms veracity and integrity of custody.  

Today, most issued artefacts and associated processes that provide the foundation of business and public-sector performance are not truly secure or immutable, and perhaps more importantly, neither the artefact(s) nor its holder(s) can be validated as authentic.

Such pervasive deferrals of trust expose measurable distributed risk to all concerned parties to include unforeseen and unacceptable institutional and personal liabilities. The current approach to managing artefacts is fraught with all facets of waste, with an incurred cost of billions of dollars attributed to lost performance, tarnished branding, and decrement in company value. As a result, deferrals become fertile ground for liabilities borne from corporate malfeasance, organised crime, identity theft and even terrorists, to name just a few. 

So, how does 4Trust’s Chain of Custody platform deliver results?

The platform delivers trustworthy artefacts linked to a blockchain record by an embedded NFC integrated circuit; the provenance of which can be monitored and confirmed in real-time through subscribed access to smart phone or desktop application.

These artefacts are produced using a robust, waterproof proprietary substrate with the same weights, thicknesses, feel and appearance as paper but with much longer estimated shelf lives. The material is engraved using industrial lasers and specialist software which produces 3D variable or fixed data images with an appearance of being manufactured into the material as watermarks. The artefacts exist as a singularly original and immutable item within a proprietary blockchain infrastructure supported by workflow modules hosted by the end-user within a 4Trust B2B license agreement.

The platform’s DLT supports their proprietary chain of custody application. This architecture and serving relationships ensure customer data remains in the licensee’s control and their existing print and document management assets can be utilised in their chain of custody platform deployment.    Three criteria are satisfied:

·      Authenticity of the artefact

·      Identity of the holder

·      Trustworthiness of the transaction.

This represents a re-invention of  “trust” and “custody” that’s fully transparent under litigation, regulatory oversight and forensic audit by providing direct and real-time links between immutable physical documents and logical transactions in a transparent singular business performance domain.