Imagine you’re a cargo owner in the year 1450. You hand over your goods to the ship that will carry them across the world, and are presented with a bill of lading—a piece of paper stating what you’re shipping, where it comes from, and where it’s heading.
Fast forward to the year 2022: The world has changed dramatically, but the bill of lading remains relatively unchanged. Today, the bill of lading process is still reliant on the physical transfer of paper records and applies to roughly 40 percent of all containerized trade transactions.
Current trade documentation spans many documents and processes, and is a manual, time-consuming, and resource-intensive…