Much of the discussion around digital trade has, understandably, concentrated on legal reform, electronic transferable records, interoperability, and the development of new platforms.

However, there remains a more basic operational question: how do businesses create trusted, structured trade information at the point where the transaction begins, in a form that can subsequently be used by everybody else?

That is the issue behind the new Trade Document Object (TDO) consultation being undertaken by Teesside University in partnership with the ICC Digital Standards Initiative.

The concept is straightforward, in that a trade document should continue to be readable by a person, but the information within it should also be capable of being available, understood, extracted and re-used by technology.

Today, an exporter may produce an invoice or packing list which is subsequently handled by a freight forwarder, bank, customs authority, buyer and various technology platforms. The same data is often entered, extracted and checked repeatedly.

Apart from the obvious inefficiency, each repetition creates another opportunity for error and inconsistency. This becomes increasingly important as banks and other trade participants make greater use of automated processing and AI.

The TDO consultation moves the discussion from theory to something that can actually be tested. Example invoices and packing lists are being made available in several forms, ranging from PDFs containing structured metadata to PDF/A-3 files incorporating XML and JSON data. The intention is deliberately not to declare a preferred solution at this stage, but to allow businesses, banks, technology providers and other participants to determine what works in genuine trade workflows.

For banks, this could become particularly significant.

A document that combines the familiar visual presentation with structured data potentially allows information to move directly into document checking, sanctions, compliance or transaction-processing systems without first being extracted from an unstructured PDF. It could also provide a stronger foundation for AI-assisted examination because the system is working with structured information created closer to its source rather than relying entirely upon subsequent interpretation of documents.

There are, however, still important questions to resolve.

Structured data only becomes genuinely useful when there is confidence in where it came from and whether it has been altered. The consultation therefore also explores metadata, organisational identity and verification, while asking what governance and assurance would be necessary before relying parties could confidently use these objects.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the initiative is that it does not propose another closed digital trade environment. The ambition is precisely the opposite in enabling familiar documents to carry information that can travel between existing systems.

This is key because digital trade will not achieve scale simply because paper is replaced with PDFs. The real transition occurs when the information represented by the document can move with the transaction and be reliably reused.

The Trade Document Object consultation is therefore a useful opportunity to test whether business can finally bridge the gap between documents that humans can read and data that machines can use.

Source: Teesside University, ICC DSI

This article represents the views of the author and not necessarily those of ICC.