City financier Edi Truell agrees to fund £500,000 to company to solve Irish border problem

The question of the Irish border appears to have eluded many of our politicians, but one City financier has come up with his own solution.

Edi Truell, co-founder of private equity and venture capital firm Disruptive Capital Finance, has said he is willing to stump up £500,000 to pay for a high-tech system for the Irish border provided by Essdocs, a company he has invested in for about a year.

Truell told City PM that Essdocs provides electric customs documentation in around 190 countries with a customer base of around 40,000.

The company is launching a business that Truell says can monitor goods through a chip that can be embedded into containers. It has teamed up with ​Swisscom Blockchain, a subsidiary of the Swiss telecoms group, to launch the business.

Brexiters have long advocated a technological solution to the Irish border question, suggesting frictionless trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic can be maintained through technology. However, critics claimed such technology had not yet been invented, and that it was necessary to keep the UK in a customs union via the so-called backstop to prevent a hard border.

Truell said Essdocs was already able to monitor iron ore shipments from Australia to Japan.

He said only 100 companies needed to be covered by the technology to cover most of the important freight in Northern Ireland.

The Irish backstop has proven to be the thorn in Theresa May's side. She is attempting to secure legal assurances on the backstop and the UK's potential exit in order to get her deal to pass through the House of Commons.

However, earlier today European Commission said it was not planning any more meetings on the issue of the backstop.