Not many good ICO's out there at the momement, but I have my eye on Wish Finance. The Singapore based wish finance tends to provide loans to small segments businesses, most of them can be considered as merchants. They have completed a pilot program which involved giving away half a million USD in loans which they gave to restaurants, boutiques, small shops, a total of 112 different SME's. The pilot was from November2016 to May of this year.
Now you must be wondering that what could be the role that blockchain technology can play into this. We need to understand that regular lenders, lets say centralized banks, need liquidity or more money to pay out these loans. The big players do what we call is securitization. Here they take their own portfolio and make a security and then they sell it to different financial companies. Now if you have been following news you would know that this year and also the previous year there were few major scandals like the Lending Club when they took bad loans (loans that defaulted) and put a package and then sell them as A+ security. Now in case of Wish Finance they are actually using the blockchain technology to make all their loan portfolios transparent. How they are doing this is that they are actually connecting to different API's to acquiring of merchants and they would be knowling in real time all the transactions. So now every loan that they will issue to every borrower and every transaction, repayment transaction they would be putting in the blockchain. So when they do this securitization and lets say that when they go to the bank to get some more money and want to sell to the banks their loan portfolios, the banks would be able to look as deep inside as to even each repayments. THis is the real reason why they need the blockchain. And also built this on blockchain as it gives more transparency and security. Even their own team will not be able to change any data inside the system when it will be over in blockchain as it will not be only in the main system of wish finance but in systems of all the wish finance borrowers.
This concept is really interesting to me and may do wonders. More detailed info is available at their website
https://wishfinance.com or you may join their telegram channel
https://t.me/wishfinance