Exclusive: "Digital trade isn't scaling", says ICC DSI, following governance overhaul
The ICC Digital Standards Initiative has rebuilt its strategy around one uncomfortable conclusion. Following its announcement on Friday 2 October of a transition to its next phase “to address increasing fragmentation”, Pamela Mar and Oswald Kuyler told TTP in an exclusive interview at Sibos in Miami what changes, and how they want to be held to account.
For six years the ICC Digital Standards Initiative (DSI) has pushed legal reform, standards alignment and trust frameworks for paperless trade. On 2 October it conceded, in effect, that none of it is reaching scale fast enough.
The DSI Governance Board, made up of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), ICC, the World Customs Organization (WCO) and the WTO Secretariat, approved a refresh of the initiative’s structure after viewing fragmentation across the digital trade ecosystem “with a high degree of concern”. TTP asked ICC DSI for the truth.
Celebrating pilots, missing scale
“We look the problem in the face and we realise that actually digital trade isn’t scaling,” said Pamela Mar, Managing Director of the ICC DSI and a member of the TTP Editorial Board. “All of the industry celebration over single pilots, over the crawling advance of eBL adoption right now at 12.8%, shows us that our current approach is inadequate to the task at hand.”
Oswald Kuyler, Senior Digital Trade Advisor at ADB, put the gap in starker terms. Nine in ten organisations have yet to start the journey, and banks cannot close that gap alone. “A bank does not create the documents it finances,” he said. “When you have a look at the customer side of things, the market penetration rate is even lower when it comes to the other document types.”
Three boards, one work programme
The new model adds a Technology Advisory Board (TAB) of the software companies businesses use to create trade records, with a kickoff likely this month, and a Standards Advisory Board (SAB) for standards development organisations. A refined Industry Advisory Board (IAB) of trade heads, finance included, will set foundational requirements across standards, trust and identity. The Legal Reform Advisory Board carries on unchanged.
Kuyler likened the design to a corporate IT department: business sets the requirements and technology responds. Since the WTO gathering in Geneva in September, the technology group has widened well beyond the large ERP vendors. “A lot of SMEs might use QuickBooks, FreshBooks, Microsoft Excel,” he said. The IAB will endorse solutions as well as standards, because too many initiatives led by associations “produce something but then the uptake isn’t there”.
Mar said this is how digital islands form today, with each corporate asking its own ERP provider or trade tech vendor for a bespoke fix. “What we’re doing now is saying, let’s all collectively decide together what our collective requirements are.”
Where that leaves the tradetech platforms
Pressed on the platforms that aggregate many trade banks and their clients, Kuyler split them in two. Those adding value through supply chain visibility, workflow and AI are untouched by the DSI’s work. Those whose business model is purely sharing a record face harder questions, and ADB doubts a future in which every invoice must travel through one. “But again, it’s not up to the ADB. It’s not up to ICC. We’re going to go through a process to get that decision made.”
Neither sees agentic AI as a shortcut. “Agentic AI can do many things, but I don’t know if it can actually solve the core issue on trade,” said Mar. Kuyler added, “When I go into a courtroom I can’t just say I trusted my agent.”
Holding them to account
Mar’s target is unambiguous. “Success is we’re going to digitalise global trade by 2030,” she said, meaning every organisation that trades can generate and ingest a globally interoperable, trusted digital trade record.
Kuyler’s leading indicators are settled requirements and the technology firms around one table. His forecast for next year is telling, “We’re going to have to probably end up doing pilots and prototypes yet again,” this time with large commodity firms or carriers. The lagging indicator is an SME walking into a bank with a purchase order the bank can verify digitally, without phoning the buyer to check.
TTP has tracked this programme since the DSI’s July 2025 roadmap and Kuyler’s “save as” interview in June. Public admissions of this kind are rare, and welcome. The first real test comes this month, when we learn which software houses actually sign up to the TAB. Another round of pilots in 2027 will only count if it is judged by the measure Mar set herself, “Everyone knows the technology works, but can it scale?”
Key Topics
- The ICC Digital Standards Initiative has acknowledged that digital trade adoption is not scaling sufficiently despite six years of work on legal reform and standards alignment.
- A new governance model introduces technology and standards advisory boards to align software vendors, ERP providers and standards organisations with business requirements in digital trade.
- Only 12.8 per cent of bills of lading have been digitised and nine in ten organisations have not yet begun their digital trade journey.
- Trade finance banks alone cannot drive digital adoption because they do not create the documents they finance and must engage customers and service providers across the supply chain.
- The success of digital trade initiatives will be measured by whether every organisation that trades can generate and ingest globally interoperable, trusted digital records by 2030.
Key Insights
Expert Analysis
Pamela Mar, Managing Director of the ICC DSI, acknowledged that the DSI's six-year approach has failed to reach scale: "All of the industry celebration over single pilots, over the crawling advance of eBL adoption right now at 12.8%, shows us that our current approach is inadequate to the task at hand." She set an unambiguous success target: "Success is we're going to digitalise global trade by 2030, meaning every organisation that trades can generate and ingest a globally interoperable, trusted digital trade record." Oswald Kuyler, Senior Digital Trade Advisor at ADB, framed the gap more starkly: nine in ten organisations have yet to start, and "A bank does not create the documents it finances. When you have a look at the customer side of things, the market penetration rate is even lower when it comes to the other document types." On agentic AI, Kuyler was dismissive: "When I go into a courtroom I can't just say I trusted my agent."
Key Findings
- Electronic bill of lading adoption stands at 12.8 per cent, indicating that after six years of DSI work, the vast majority of trade-critical documents remain paper based.
- Ninety per cent of organisations have yet to begin the journey toward digital trade, representing a failure of the current approach to reach scale.
- The new DSI structure introduces a Technology Advisory Board to include software vendors across the ecosystem, reflecting recognition that large ERP providers alone do not represent how most businesses create documents.
- Trade tech platforms are being split into two categories by the ADB: those adding value through supply chain visibility and AI will continue unmolested, while those operating as pure record aggregators face harder questions about their future.
- The DSI has committed to a measurable outcome: by 2030, every organisation that trades should be able to generate and ingest a globally interoperable, trusted digital trade record.
Implications
- Trade finance institutions must actively engage suppliers and customers outside their direct networks rather than expect digital adoption to flow from bank-led initiatives alone.
- Software vendors serving SMEs will face increasing pressure to adopt standards and interoperable formats as the DSI moves toward collective requirements rather than bespoke solutions.
- Trade tech platforms offering only record aggregation without added value through visibility, workflow or analytics face structural questioning about their long-term viability in a standards-driven ecosystem.
- A second round of pilots in 2027 will test whether the new governance model can drive scalable adoption, with failure to deliver measurable progress likely to trigger further strategic change.
- Legacy document creation tools and processes across small and medium enterprises will need to integrate with digital trade standards, requiring significant investment in education and technical support.
Key Takeaways
- Digital trade adoption is failing to scale; only 12.8 per cent of bills of lading are digitised and nine in ten organisations have not started the transition.
- The ICC DSI has restructured its governance to include technology advisory and standards boards, recognising that SME software vendors and standards organisations must be engaged directly.
- Banks alone cannot drive digital adoption because they do not create the documents they finance; suppliers, traders and customers must be integrated from the start.
- Agentic AI is not a solution to digital trade challenges; trust frameworks and accountability still require human verification and legal certainty.
- Success will be measured by whether SMEs can walk into a bank with a digitally verifiable purchase order by 2030, not by the completion of pilots or technology milestones alone.
