At Trade Treasury Payments (TTP), we often talk about the building blocks of a modern trade-tech stack. But few conversations crystallise the interplay between compliance, speed, and implementation quite as clearly as this discussion with Przemek Luniewski, Chief Technology Officer at Secro.

Luniewski has spent two decades building and deploying systems across industries, giving him a practitioner’s view of how digitisation actually takes hold inside large organisations. For him, the story of trade technology is about much more than just digitising documents. It is also a tale of creating systems that are secure, adaptable, and fast enough to keep up with a market where regulatory change and commercial pressure are all too common.

Designing digital trade around security and trust

Much of the industry’s digital progress depends on the premise that counterparties must be able to trust the system that carries their data. Luniewski argues that digital trade breaks down when security is bolted on at the end rather than built into the architecture.

Secro embeds the trust layer directly into its platform design, which means that identity verification is the starting point. “Every user that is accessing the solution is a verified individual. There is no guest access whatsoever,” he said. In practice, this removes a significant share of risk because organisations always know who is interacting with their documents and workflows.

From there, the priority becomes security. Luniewski described how redundancy, replication, and continuous monitoring work together to ensure that documents cannot be lost, altered, or accessed in ways that undermine the transaction. Since trade processes rely on documents that carry legal and financial weight, when the technological systems guarantee integrity, institutions can begin to move away from the fragility of paper without creating new points of failure.

On the compliance side, Luniewski points out how Secro’s platform is engineered to align with recognised frameworks such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001 so that every new workflow inherits those controls automatically. While the industry has been shifting in this direction for some time, digital adoption really begins to accelerate when compliance is part of the core architecture rather than an exercise that slows deployment. 

Speed, configurability, and the push to deliver faster

If compliance provides stability, speed provides relevance. Banks, traders, and logistics firms operate in a fast-paced environment and need tools that can adapt quickly as regulations evolve or new digital instruments become legally recognised. This means that time-to-market has become a competitive differentiator.

Luniewski believes the only sustainable way to achieve this is through configurability rather than custom development. Secro’s components can be rearranged or adjusted without rebuilding the platform each time. “The configuration capabilities allow for rapid change and rapid solution creation,” he said. That enables banks or corporates to modify a process within days rather than months.

This is particularly important when dealing with jurisdiction-specific requirements such as data sovereignty. Many institutions want hybrid architectures that keep certain data within national borders while still allowing global workflow integration. Secro designs these setups with clients on a case-by-case basis to ensure that local hosting rules are honoured without needing to create fragmented internal processes for clients. The mechanism behind this is referred to as selective replication, meaning that sensitive fields can stay local, while data that needs to be shared is still able to flow across the broader system.

Implementation and the human side of digital change

The final piece, implementation, is often the one that determines whether a project succeeds. Within an organisation, technology can only scale if people trust it, understand it, and see its value. Luniewski explained that in any technology implementation, resistance is natural, especially when employees fear a system may replace their role.

This is why, during the early stages of an implementation, Secro often runs the new digital workflows in parallel with existing processes, letting staff adopt the new system gradually. Once they see that digitalisation removes manual work rather than replacing their expert judgment, their keenness to adopt tends to accelerate. “The technology is there to help them,” Luniewski said. “It’s going to change the way they work and help them.”

This is yet another reason why modularity is so powerful. Rather than forcing clients to abandon existing systems, Secro can bridge gaps between them by keeping what already works and upgrading what does not. That lowers resistance, shortens deployment time, and avoids disruptions to business-critical operations.

What comes next for tradetech

Looking ahead, Luniewski expects adaptability to define the next era of digital trade. As digital instruments gain greater legal standing, organisations will need systems that can evolve without requiring a wholesale rebuild whenever business processes shift. 

“The question institutions should ask is simple”, he said, “how quickly can the platform change when the market changes?”

For an industry built on centuries-old documentary practices, that mindset is a turning point. Digital trade will advance not through one-off projects, but through systems that make the holy trinity of trade technology -compliance, speed, and implementation – work in unison.