VAKT is a consortium of leading energy companies and banks, with the aim of transforming the global commodities trading industry. Traditionally, the post-trade process would involve both parties checking paperwork and changing records on separate, manual systems, which is time-consuming and error-prone.
ThoughtWorks leveraged blockchain technology to build a digital platform, allowing all parties to manage that process in the same place for the very first time. This was an unprecedented and highly ambitious project, with each of the twelve organizations bringing their own business logic and API to factor into the platform. ThoughtWorks helped VAKT design the platform’s infrastructure on AWS to support the new processes they would follow once launched.
The organizations in the consortium are: BP, Equinor, Shell, Gunvor, Koch, Mercuria, ABN Amro, ING, Société Générale, Chevron, Reliance, Total.
VAKT held an open development competition between a shortlist of 10 providers bidding to partner with VAKT on its innovative mission. ThoughtWorks demonstrated its collaborative ways of working and technical excellence and was subsequently selected.
The scale at which VAKT wanted to implement blockchain technology was ground-breaking, so before starting work, the ThoughtWorks team carried out a thorough five-week discovery process including contextual interviews and agile techniques. The ThoughtWorks team was split across the UK and India, with the UK members based in the VAKT office, working as one with the VAKT team, with total transparency. As the project ramped up rapidly, so did the ThoughtWorks team, growing from 15 to 70 members in only six weeks.
