Fess up time:Is digital trade finally changing?

Five years ago, Deepesh Patel, Editor-in-Chief at Trade Treasury Payments, sat down with Oswald Kuyler, Senior Digital Trade Advisor at the Asian Development Bank‘s Trade & Supply Chain Finance Program (TSCFP) – and an avocado pear. The avocado was there to make the point that shipping one from Kenya took around 30 paper documents. Now that avocado is back on the table, this time at TTP Studios. But has anything changed, and what needs to be done for digital trade to finally start delivering?

Years of legal wins  –  but one lingering problem

During this last conversation with Kuyler in 2020, the Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR) was largely aspirational. Today, the UK, France, and China are among the major economies to have formally adopted it, and over 60% of the global trading community has committed to alignment.

“On the legal reform side, things have actually gone considerably well,” Kuyler said. “We’ve made enormous progress on getting countries to adopt it.”

But legal permission is not quite the same as operational reality. The bigger challenge – connectivity – remains unsolved. Trade documentation still largely requires counterparties to share the same platform, or at least compatible ones. “Are we on the same platform? Are our platforms interoperable?” Kuyler said. Freedom of choice, the ability to share records by email or through any existing system, is still the preferred destination, rather than the current state.

Snog, marry, or avoid?

To cut through the complexity, Patel reached for an unorthodox analytical tool.

On platforms, Kuyler declined a single verdict. However, on single-function platforms –  those whose only purpose is record sharing – he would unashamedly snog.

“There’s no reason why we sign a contract, share it over email, digitally sign it, yet all the underlying documentation requires a special little place for us to actually exchange it,” he said.

Platforms offering genuine automation, analytics, and AI, however, he would marry. The distinction is important as an SME using Excel to run their business should not be forced onto a platform simply to send an invoice.

On digital identity, the unequivocal answer was marry.

“If you think about trade, it’s about two things: documents and identity,” Kuyler said. He is less enthusiastic about the approaches taken so far – those he might only blow a kiss at –but sees genuine progress coming, particularly in cross-border identity resolution.

On agentic AI, Kuyler wanted to marry it twice – and didn’t care much to discuss the alternative. “Too many people focus on the potential job impacts,” he said –  his focus, instead, is on what AI hands to the smaller player. He proved the point himself by building a program in three days despite not having written a line of code in two decades. “We’re going to see some magical companies coming out of this,” he said.

The case for documents before data

Kuyler is pointed on one of the industry’s more fashionable positions: the push to move from documents to pure data. He is not opposed to the ambition, but insists the sequencing matters.

“If you’re going to get rid of documents, what does an SME do?” he asked. “If they can’t go into Excel and create an invoice, the alternative is logging into every customer portal and re-entering data multiple times. That is not simpler, cheaper, or faster.” The answer, in his framework, is not documents or data but documents that contain data: structured, machine-readable, and verifiable at the point of creation, using tools businesses already know.

The ‘save as’ revolution

This is where the Asian Development Bank’s practical strategy takes shape. The global trade ecosystem, at its most fundamental level, involves around 160 million businesses producing documents, serviced by roughly 50,000 trade enablers – banks, carriers, insurers –  with those documents generated using software from approximately 140 technology firms, including Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Google and others.

The problem, Kuyler argues, does not originate in trade finance. It begins with the save button. “When I select file save as PDF, it produces something that doesn’t align to our industry’s requirements,” he said. “And we’ve been trying to solve for that for 27 years with platforms.”

The new approach is to engage those 140 technology firms directly –  to create a new trade document type that, when selected at save, automatically harmonises data, resolves identity, and embeds trust verification. The analogy is the MP3 format: record labels and technology firms coming together to create a standard that allowed music to travel across any device, regardless of how it was produced. “People can produce records, share them regardless of what application was used to produce them,” he said. “That’s our northern star.”

The roadmap and the accountability

Kuyler is explicit about the milestones. In 2026, the priority is to establish requirements with technology firms; a key gathering in Geneva in September will be the first accountability marker. In 2027, pilots and proofs of concept. In 2028, visibility into product launch windows. By 2030, the goal is for going digital to no longer be a standalone agenda item, superseded by the innovation that follows it.

Recent conversations with technology firms have given him confidence. Concerns that competitors like SAP and Microsoft would never collaborate have not materialised: these firms already work closely together. What gives him pause is not resistance from the tech sector, but the risk of fatigue within the trade community itself. “It’s difficult to stay excited on a programme for five years straight,” he said. “The onus is going to be on us to show progress and create a sense of momentum again.”

With the avocado still waiting to be shipped digitally, momentum and the save button may be what the next five years ultimately hinge on.

Prefer to listen? The full conversation is also available as a podcast below.