EY launches OpsChain Contract Manager solution to support secure private business agreements on public Ethereum

• Facilitates the fulfilment of complex, multi-party business agreements, supporting confidentiality and helping improve time efficiency and cost reduction
• Utilizes public blockchain's security and accessibility with data privacy through zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), enhancing contract integrity and mitigating value leakage
• Addresses the enterprise challenge of managing multi-party contracts across siloed systems, internally and with business partners

LONDON, April 17, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The EY organization today announces the launch of EY OpsChain Contract Manager (OCM), a transformative blockchain-enabled solution for contract management. EY OCM helps enterprises to execute complex business agreements, supporting confidentiality, helping improve time efficiency, and achieving cost reduction, with automatic adherence to the agreed terms.

Launched at the annual EY Global Blockchain Summit, EY OCM helps address the enterprise challenge of managing business agreements that run across internal and external operational and technology siloes. EY OCM synchronizes data across business partners and uniformly enforces key business terms such as standardized pricing, volume discounts, rebates and strike prices.

Enterprises often struggle to fully implement and capture value from their business agreements. Spend gets fragmented across internal enterprise barriers, making it hard to track and qualify for agreed-upon discounts and rebates. Smart contracts enable aggregation of spend across systems and even external business partners and then consistently applies contract terms. Driven by this value proposition, Zion Market Research predicts that the global smart contracts market will grow to an estimated US $1 billion by 2030 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 24% between 2023 and 2030.

The solution runs on the Ethereum public blockchain, enabling truly decentralized operation in a trust-worthy environment. This helps avoid giving a strategic advantage to either a buyer or a seller and assists in eliminating the high costs of setting up and running a private network, as well as the risks that come from sharing sensitive business information with a centralized industry portal. The system maintains enterprise privacy using Zero Knowledge Circuits.

The EY OCM solution can be easily used in existing enterprise systems through a standardized API. Most business contract types can be supported including volume purchase agreements, standardized rate cards, volume discounts, rebates, and price models that depend on market data feeds. The first test users of the solution are implementing complex Power Purchasing Agreements (PPAs) that include market prices, strike prices with minimum and maximum purchase criteria.

Paul Brody, EY Global Blockchain Leader, says:

"We've identified from past client work that contract automation can improve accuracy while cutting cycle times by more than 90%, and overall contract administration costs by nearly 40%. With our zero-knowledge privacy technology, we have industrialized this capability, and we can now get these benefits at a fraction of the up-front cost. Deploying on a public blockchain is not only cheaper, but also much more scalable, helping enable many-to-many integrations on an open platform with no one company having an unfair advantage by controlling the network."

For more information about EY Blockchain, visit: https://www.ey.com/en_gl/services/blockchain.

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This news release has been issued by EYGM Limited, a member of the global EY organization that also does not provide any services to clients.

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