ICC, the Singapore Government, and major firms from key industries have signed a historic cooperation agreement to facilitate and accelerate adoption of digital technologies in trade and commerce. The global industry leaders participating in the agreement are APRIL, DBS Bank, Marubeni Corporation, Mastercard, Mitsubishi Corporation, Mitsui & Co., Ltd., Mizuho Bank, Ltd., MUFG Bank, Noble, NTT DATA, PSA International, Sompo Japan Nipponkoa, Standard Chartered Bank, Sumitomo Corporation, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Tokio Marine, and Trafigura.

This public-private partnership between global organisations will be a significant leap forward to shift international trade from a paper-based system to digitally-enabled trade. It will create enormous potential value based on time and operational cost savings combined with the greatly reduced incidence of fraud and human error.

“Digital platforms will lower existing barriers to international trade in the coming years and enable many more businesses to participate in the new global economy. In line with ICC’s 21st century purpose, we are committed to enabling the broadest possible adoption of these digital technologies and support the development and recognition of universally accepted best practice standards for digitalisation, based on global consensus and the work being done by our partners today,” said John W.H. Denton AO, ICC Secretary General.

As one of the largest global trading hubs, Singapore is capitalising on its strong networks to bring together an efficient and unified process of digitalised trade. The country is partnering various international organisations, governments and industry players on the development of TradeTrust – a multilateral, open legal and technical framework, that enables inter-operability across different trade platforms and formats for the exchange of digital trade documents on a public blockchain. This strategic initiative is led by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) with the Maritime Port Authority (MPA), and supported by partner agency, Enterprise Singapore.

One of the first platforms built on the TradeTrust framework is ICC TradeFlow. ICC TradeFlow was co-developed by ICC together with trade tech firm, Perlin, in collaboration with IMDA, commodities trader Trafigura, and DBS Bank. A landmark USD20M pilot trade was executed on ICC TradeFlow in November 2019, with an iron ore shipment from South Africa to China. To further support the industry-wide digitalisation, partners in this pilot trade are making further major trade volume commitments to be executed on this platform.