The Infinity Maritime platform enables fractional ownership of cargo ships.

Infinity Maritime aims to provide a sustainable solution for maritime finance by digitizing ship portfolios on its platform. This enables fractional ownership, secondary trading in ships, and the financing of environmentally sustainable fleets. The London-based platform announced Wednesday a collaboration with four major shipbrokers to source ships for the creation of a sustainable fleet. (THE FINTECH TIMES)

Andrew Graham, Chairman, Infinity Maritime said on the occasion that the concept of digitized finance for the maritime industry was now much better understood.

It was therefore an opportune time to push for its adoption, considering the difficulties in securing finance for the sector.

Maritime brokers board Infinity Maritime

Infinity will collaborate with maritime brokers Maersk Broker, SSY, Arrow, and BRS. They will focus on sourcing modern, low-carbon-footprint Ultramax and Kamsarmax bulk carriers for Infinity Maritime.

The brokers will also provide ship and portfolio valuations, offer chartering services, perform market research, and trade Infinity’s fractional units (dubbed Meta units).

The platform will create asset-backed Meta Units of its ship portfolio. These would be tradeable, thereby setting up a secondary market for the ships and investors.

Meta Units

Investors in Infinity’s Meta Units enjoy the following benefits:

• Ownership registered on a secure distributed ledger
• Securities held in a cryptographically secured and easy to use digital wallet
• Dividend payments can be automatic for execution by a smart contract
• Enhanced liquidity of private securities and 24/7 market access
• Trustworthy audit trails and reporting

Graham said that the four progressive shipbrokers would work with the platform to trade the Meta Units owned by investors and representing the value of the vessels in the portfolio.

Financing the maritime industry

“Alternative financing and lending have become a common, recurring theme over the last couple of years in the international ship finance industry. We are actively involved in all aspects of alternative ship finance, and ship finance in general. We believe different kinds of securitization will be part of the future alternative financing landscape and believe the Infinity Maritime Meta Unit could develop into being an interesting market alternative for financiers and investors in the maritime industry,” said Maersk Broker Advisory Services Managing Director, Jesper Bo Hansen.

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