Most accounts of trade digitisation agree on two things: that the legal foundations are being laid, and that the technology is ready. And yet after a decade of effort, the world’s trade documents remain stubbornly on paper, and the sector seems more and more fragmented as more platforms and players emerge. TTP and the ICC Digital Standards Initiative convened senior figures from banks, fintechs, corporates and policymakers to ask what the industry has been missing.
Sense in scale
Trade digitisation is, by every conventional measure, ready to ramp up. Countries accounting for 62.5% of global exports have either aligned or committed to legally recognising electronic transferable records by aligning with the Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR), a harmonised UNCITRAL framework for granting digital trade records the same legal status as their paper equivalents.
The ICC DSI‘s KTDDE framework has mapped standardised data fields across 36 core trade documents. Major banks have piloted electronic bills of lading across jurisdictions, and the underlying technology for the reliable transfer of trade documents has been proven repeatedly.
And yet global adoption has been slow. The eBL, heavily promoted as a mature, tested bellwether, accounts for roughly 11% of bills of lading in containerised trade, up from 5% a year earlier and 1.2% in 2021.
But Bolero, the earliest electronic bill of lading platform, has been operational since 1999. Twenty-six years on, fewer than one in nine bills of lading is electronic. Those two facts make for sobering reading. One participant observed that if the industry keeps fighting over 5% adoption, many of its players will not be around to fight much longer. The numbers beyond the roundtable confirm the picture.
The FIT Alliance’s 2024 survey, conducted with BCG and the HKUST Li & Fung Supply Chain Institute, found banking standing out as the anomaly: 82.5% awareness of eBLs, just 21.1% adoption. Across the wider sample, nearly half of respondents now incorporate eBLs in some capacity – a meaningful improvement over two years earlier, but one that has so far fallen short of the institutions that do the most trade. The sector with the most to gain isn’t exactly blazing a trail.
Working, but not travelling
The technology, where it has been deployed, has delivered. In September 2023, Lloyds and Matalan completed the UK’s first transaction under the Electronic Trade Documents Act, within days of the law passing, digitising the collections acceptance process using a digital promissory note.
By April 2024, a follow-up transaction with MSC, Federal Bank, and Enigio (using its trace:original solution) moved a full collection from bill of lading issuance to surrender in 24 hours. The equivalent paper transaction had taken 15 days. Subsequent runs have cut that further, in some cases to a matter of hours.
The platforms underneath these flows – CargoX, ICE Digital Trade, Enigio, Secro, TradeGo, WaveBL, and others – have been the engine of nearly every successful digital transaction in the trade finance space.
Yet, even with successful pilots, the technology in place, and now legal issues resolved, adoption still sits in single digits. Trade digitisation has been treated as a technology problem, and the result is a decade of technology that works but has not scaled.
The truth is that technical go-live and market go-live, as one participant framed it, are two different destinations.
A single exchange from the roundtable illustrated it best. A digital trade provider had just completed an end-to-end letter of credit transaction with a bank and a corporate client. Clean, structured data. No scanning. No paper anywhere in the chain. At the end, one of the bank’s operations staff leaned forward with a question: could they have it all as a single combined PDF?
The reason was institutional. The bank’s filing procedures required every transaction to be archived as a single document. The system had been built for paper, and nobody had thought to question it. The institution was genuinely committed to digital trade and had spent years embedding paper-based logic into its back office without realising it.
Beijing isn’t waiting
China offers an interesting case study of how to drive scale.
From near-zero, it has reached 20% eBL adoption – a rough estimation by some industry observers – without national MLETR, driven largely by state enterprises, shippers and banks leading the way under free zones as sites of experimentation. The New Maritime Code has just come into effect on 1 May 2026, which should lead to even faster adoption.
Countries across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, many of which count China as their largest trading partner, are now shaping the digital trade infrastructure. Those decisions will not wait for the rest of the industry to resolve its standards debates. As one participant put it, anyone trading with China should expect China to drive the change.
The Chinese example raises an uncomfortable question on the role of government. In almost every market where digital trade has scaled, government mandate has been the unlock. Egypt’s customs went digital because the state required it. Italy’s e-invoicing scaled because it became mandatory for imports and exports alike. China’s eBL adoption is happening because state enterprises were told to implement it. The patient, voluntary, standards-led path that the rest of the world has pursued has produced the slowest results. Not a comfortable conclusion for an industry that has spent a decade building consensus.
The voluntary route
Within the voluntary, standards-led path the industry has chosen, the most useful conversation at the roundtable was about where to look for the problem.
Every trade document – an invoice, a packing list, a certificate of origin – is downstream of data that already exists in a corporate system. The factory’s inventory database. The procurement platform. SAP, Oracle, and the spreadsheet a finance director maintains on her own laptop. Whatever the industry has been trying to build on top of this, the data lives there first.
The ICC DSI argues that the industry has been trying to fix things at the wrong end. Rather than asking corporates to change their systems, the proposal is to work with the ERP and IT infrastructure providers to embed trade data standards inside the systems corporates already use. A factory manager creates an invoice. If the standard is built into the template, her document is machine-readable and trusted the moment she saves it. She never knows that anything has changed. The DSI frames it as solving the “first mile” and “last mile” problems: globally compatible trade data should be the default output of the systems people already use, not something generated separately.
In practice, this looks like a move from documents as the unit of trade to data as the unit of trade. A trade document – a bill of lading, an invoice – becomes, in this model, a particular view of an underlying bundle of verified data, rather than the source of truth itself. The verification is handled through emerging mechanisms such as verifiable credentials, which embed standardised data, cryptographic signatures, and a record of provenance directly into the trade record. Agentic AI could play a role to extract and validate data across systems without human intervention at every step. The technical building blocks exist. What is missing is the consensus to deploy them at the layer where they would do the most work.
The argument has precedent. The ERP world already handles cross-party data sharing for sustainability disclosures and Digital Product Passports – regulatory requirements that demand verified supply chain data from multiple organisations, across multiple systems. That work is already being done. Trade records, the argument goes, are the same kind of problem.
It is also no longer theoretical. At Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt, Microsoft demonstrated a proof of concept developed with HSBC, Lloyds, and ANZ. AI agents embedded directly into ERP systems extracted, validated, and transmitted structured trade data to banks, using the ICC DSI’s KTDDE framework as the common standard. The demo was built around the kind of letter-of-credit workflow that still consumes enormous manual effort across the industry. None of the parties had to change their core systems. The data moved from where it already lived.
The banks at the roundtable were broadly supportive. They requested that the ask be concrete. One drew the comparison to payments. Corporations don’t think about the message formats that make international payments work; they use the system, and the standardisation happens underneath. That, the banker suggested, is the model trade should be working towards.
The fintechs and platform providers were constructive. Their concern was about being misread. Going to the ERPs changes what platforms are for. The data infrastructure and the transaction layer are different things. The platforms have built every digital transaction on the books today. They should not be expected to solve the underlying data standardisation problem.
The catch
The question that had been waiting all session came out late. The industry, one participant said, risked passing the hot potato to another vertical. What if they say no?
It is the right question. The ERP argument has logic on its side. These companies already hold the data, manage cross-party standards compliance for other regulatory regimes, and have the relationships with corporates that trade digitisation needs to reach. But making them see trade records as their problem will require a business case that has not yet been built. It will require corporate customers to tell their ERP providers that it matters. It will require the kind of pressure the industry has so far found difficult to maintain.
The PDF question at the end of that demo was an organisational failure, not a technological one. Until the industry finds a way to solve for that, at scale and invisibly, without asking a factory manager or a bank clerk to change how they think, the symptoms will persist.
| This report was produced under Chatham House rules. No statements are attributed to individual speakers or their organisations. |
Further reading
For a detailed treatment of how digital trade is working in practice – including end-to-end transaction flows, interoperability between platforms, and the case studies referenced in this piece – readers may find TTP’s recent guide useful: A Practical Guide to Documentary Collections, published with BAFT and the ICC. Chapter 7, on the digitalisation of collections, sets out the legal and technical framework alongside worked examples from Lloyds, ExxonMobil/CEAT, Trade Technologies, Mercore and others.
Sources
FIT Alliance 2024 eBL Survey, conducted with BCG and the HKUST Li & Fung Supply Chain Institute (December 2024)
A Practical Guide to Documentary Collections, BAFT, ICC and TTP (2025)
ICC DSI, Digitalising Global Trade: A Roadmap to Interoperability and Trust at Scale (July 2025)
TTP coverage of the Microsoft / ICC DSI Sibos 2025 demonstration
