Reel | Building the foundations for global digital trade - Trade Treasury Payments

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Reel | Building the foundations for global digital trade

At the Commonwealth Business Summit in Windhoek, Namibia, Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) spoke with Emmanuelle Ganne, Chief of Digital Trade and Frontier Technologies at the World Trade Organization (WTO), to discuss the legal, technical, and infrastructural foundations needed to enable cross-border paperless trade.

Ganne said, “Let me start with a few words on MLETR – the Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records. It plays a critical role in moving to paperless cross-border trade because it ensures that electronic documents have the same legal effect, validity, and enforceability as paper ones.”

Trust is the bedrock of digital trade. For the ecosystem to function, legal certainty is essential, something MLETR provides. But adoption remains limited.

Ganne said, “Only ten jurisdictions have adopted MLETR-compliant legislation. We need to do much more to promote global adoption. But laws alone are not enough. They may be the foundation, but they are not the finish line.”

Alongside legal frameworks, digital infrastructure remains a central challenge. Connectivity gaps, especially in developing countries, continue to hold back progress.

“There are still 2.6 billion people who are not connected to the internet, or when they are, it’s often at high cost and with very low bandwidth. We need digital infrastructure, we need data centres, and we need to connect people,” Ganne said.

Equally important is interoperability. Fragmentation, whether in legal frameworks, technical standards, or digital identity systems, is a growing threat to progress.

Ganne said, “Fragmentation is the enemy. We need interoperability of standards. Good progress has been made with data models, but we now need to move from documents to data elements to ensure information can flow seamlessly along the supply chain.”

Organisations like the ICC Digital Standards Initiative and the Asian Development Bank are already working to develop a global data interoperability model. But adoption and implementation will be key.

“Digital identity of companies plays a critical role in international trade. It allows you to uniquely identify and authenticate a company in the context of electronic transactions, and to attach verifiable credentials to this identity. That helps to build trust.”

The goal, she added, is not simply to develop new pilots or prototypes, but to operationalise trust, infrastructure, and interoperability at scale.

Ganne concluded, “We need to raise awareness. We need to build capacity. And we need to make sure that the right rules are being put in place so that we can move from pilots, as we have them today, to global digital trade.”

Watch the reel via Youtube.