Everyone in the trade process will benefit, since it caters for smoother, faster, safer, cheaper and sustainable processes in trade and supply chain management.

For companies, especially SMEs, it will be an enabler for improved efficiency and access to working capital management.

By using a digital bill of exchange, for example, created with trace:original, it will be affordable and easy to set up and execute a transaction. Smaller amounts and short-term receivables are becoming financeable. SMEs will also gain easier access to ECA (export credit agency) guarantees.

It is not always possible to foresee all stakeholders that may come into possession of documents or need to verify the documents. Make sure that the solution you choose also works for your customers and everyone else that might be involved in a document transaction, without requiring onboarding or additional infrastructure.

With trace:original, we solved this by making it possible for anyone to receive, validate, manage, and transfer trace:original documents at a free public web service, traceoriginal.com.  The service requires no onboarding and is accessible with any computer with an internet connection.

The most significant issue to widespread adoption is the vast number of different stakeholders and parties that need to embrace change. Global trade is a fragmented and complex ecosystem, with countless parties interacting across hundreds of markets. Paper documents and manual processes are long-established, universally understood and trusted.

We should, therefore, not expect a sudden leap towards universal digitalisation. Adoption must be seen as a process of transition, involving technological and legislative innovations, and leaving no one behind. Above all, this transition initially has to involve replicating current paper-based processes rather than eliminating them.

With trace:original, the digital process mimics the paper process. Up to the point of printing the document, the processes are the same with the same workflows and the same documents and forms. However, instead of printing the document on physical paper, you create a trace:original digital original document that can be electronically signed and sent digitally. Should there be a need, trace:original documents can also be securely converted to physical documents.

It is not unusual that solutions use crypto currencies to document transactions. Crypto currencies are often volatile and their inherent anonymity may increase risk of abuse for money laundering and other fraudulent purposes. Make sure that your solution for electronic trade records does not risk to come into conflict with your anti-money laundering policies and commitments.

With trace:original we use a dedicated blockchain that is used solely as a public distributed ledger for trace:original documents, still anchoring blocks in other public blockchains. This means that you get all of the certainty and security of blockchain technology, but none of the drawbacks of crypto currencies.

Digitalising your trade documents does not have to mean changing your processes, forms or documents. Make sure that the solution you choose has a minimum impact on your current processes to avoid unnecessary large IT-projects.

With trace:original, you can use the same forms and documents that you use today, but instead of printing them on paper, they are "printed" as digital original files, that can be electronically signed, appended, transferred and invalidated, just like their paper equivalents. The trace:original document combines PDF and structured data. Therefore it is both human readable, recognisable and compatible with current processes and machine readable (interoperability) with possibility to incorporate industry data standards, e.g. JSON data schemas.