The challenge
Korab is a Swedish trading house dealing in paper and pulp — buying from suppliers across the world and selling into markets where speed and reliability matter. The commercial reality is straightforward: bills of exchange need to be signed before goods ship. They're the security that keeps the transaction moving.
The problem was paper. Documents were emailed to the counterparty, who then had to print them, find the right person to sign, and courier them back before Korab could proceed. If everything went smoothly, that took a week. When it didn't, it could take a month.
"Our customers do everything digitally otherwise," says Alexandra Öhrn, Trade Finance Manager at Korab. "They do most of their business on their phones. And when you send something that they have to physically print, find a printer, find the right person to sign it — if the customer is very fast it could add a week to the process. Sometimes it adds a month."
On top of the time lost, there were the courier costs for the return journey — getting a signed document back from Kenya or Uganda could run €50–60 per envelope. And once the email was sent, there was no visibility — no way to know if it had been printed, who had signed it, or when it would come back.
The solution
Korab adopted Enigio's trace:original to digitise their bills of exchange. The decision came down to a single requirement: the solution had to be open. Counterparties couldn't be required to sign up to a platform — that was a non-starter for a trading house working with dozens of different partners across multiple markets.
trace:original met that bar. Only Korab needed to be onboarded. Their counterparties receive the document, sign with one click, and send it back — no registration, no new system to learn.
"We found Enigio and they have digital bills of exchange," says Öhrn. "Now we can send them to our customers and by one click they can sign and send it back to us."
The other thing that changed: certainty. With paper, Korab never knew who had actually signed or when the document would arrive. Digitally, that information is built in.
"We know the person signing it is the one signing it, and we know when it's coming back."
The impact
The time savings are significant — weeks removed from a process that used to drag the whole transaction. The courier costs are gone. And the operational overhead of chasing paper across continents has simply disappeared.
For Öhrn, the shift reflects something she'd been waiting for: trade finance finally catching up to how everyone else works.
"Paper isn't a thing in any other part of my life."
What's made the transition stick is that it didn't require their customers to change how they work in any meaningful way. One click replaces a printer, a pen, and a courier.
"It feels like we're doing something right — and it feels good to do something that's easy for our customers."