Global trade keeps the world moving, but it’s still trapped in paper. One transaction can involve 30 stakeholders, 240 paper copies and weeks of delays. TWIN is the trusted trade network built to fix that. Watch how in just over 2 minutes. #TrustedTrade

A 2023 UK Cabinet Office evaluation estimated that automating customs declarations from business documents could take up to £225 million a year off the administrative burden, if it cut industry's data collection costs by 40%. Not a saving on shipping, or tariffs, or the goods themselves. It's the cost of assembling information that already exists.

The UN's latest global survey of 174 economies puts the average implementation of trade facilitation measures at 71%. For cross-border paperless trade, it's 49%. Roughly half of what it takes for trade documents to move digitally between countries is in place.

Nine years after the WTO's Trade Facilitation Agreement came into force, the WTO's own tracker puts the implementation rate at 89.6%. Much of what's left needs outside technical help before a country can put it in place. 53 members have committed to implementing 216 of those measures in 2026 and 2027.

A deadline most EU businesses haven't planned for yet. From 1 July 2030, invoices between businesses in different EU countries will have to be structured electronic invoices, under the EU's VAT in the Digital Age reform. Paper and PDF invoices stop counting for those transactions, and each one is reported to the tax authorities as it's issued. Some countries are moving first. Belgium switched its domestic business invoicing on 1 January 2026, and France began phasing it in from September.

UNCTAD's customs software, ASYCUDA, was running in 103 countries and territories by the end of 2024. Its next generation is being built on the cloud, with interoperability between systems and across borders as a stated goal. A customs declaration that is digital in one country still has to be understood by the next one.

Around 11% of bills of lading were issued electronically in 2025, according to the Digital Container Shipping Association. Nine of the largest container carriers have committed to going fully electronic by 2030. That leaves nearly nine in ten to switch over in about five years.

A plant health certificate travels with most shipments of fruit, flowers and grain. 100 countries now exchange them electronically through the IPPC's ePhyto Hub. A country outside that group still receives paper, signed and stamped by hand. So the same exporter can send a digital certificate to one market and a stamped paper copy to the next.

Digitalized trade documentation is linked to a 40% cut in shipment times and an 80% cut in processing costs. Time is the part that reaches the exporter's bank account. Cargo paid for sooner is the next crop bought sooner. Same goods. Same route. Less waiting.

By 2023, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa had adopted fewer than two thirds of the trade facilitation practices the UN maps. Not because the case is unclear. Because each one needs a counterpart country to accept it. Trust is the part that does not automate.

A funder asking whether a trade is real is not doubting the exporter. It is asking a narrower question: can anyone outside the deal confirm what happened, without taking either side's word for it. A complete set of documents does not answer that. Independent confirmation does, and that difference is the whole credit decision.

The World Economic Forum estimates digital trade facilitation could cut trade costs by up to 25%. Not by moving anything faster, but by lowering what it costs to prove a shipment matches its paperwork.

Eight of the fourteen economies in East and Southeast Asia still trail developed countries on paperless trade adoption. Some of the busiest ports in the world sit inside that group. The goods move at sea speed. The paperwork does not.

An exporter who ships on time, every time, for five years has built something a lender would want to see. Almost none of it is written down anywhere a lender can read. Each shipment clears and the record of it scatters across brokers, forwarders and email. The track record exists. It just cannot be shown.

Chasing one shipment's paperwork can mean hundreds of emails, calls and re-sent copies. Digitalized trade is linked to 90% fewer trade-related emails. Less chasing. Faster trade.

A bank lending against a shipment mostly looks at the exporter's balance sheet, not the shipment. A first-time exporter with a confirmed buyer and goods on the water can still fail that test. So the smallest exporters get assessed on the thing they have least of.

An exporter pays for the crop, the packaging and the freight long before the buyer pays for the goods. That gap can run for weeks or months. Wages and the next shipment both fall inside it. The more an exporter sells, the more of its cash sits inside that gap. Funding that gap is what lets the next order happen.

A funder lending against a shipment needs to know who is holding the goods, and when that changed. Nine separate documents in a trade relate to that transfer of possession, and confirming them from another country means taking someone's word for it. Funders lend on the assumption that the word might be wrong, and the exporter carries the difference.

$2.5 trillion of trade finance is requested and declined every year. The goods are real. The buyers are real. The paperwork is in order. Still rejected. Lenders fund what they can confirm for themselves, quickly enough to matter.

Around 70% of letters of credit are rejected the first time they are presented. The cargo has usually sailed by then, and the exporter waits while the documents go back for correction. The discrepancy is usually clerical. Even so, the exporter is paid weeks after the buyer has the goods.

An exporter without the assets a bank wants as security still has places to borrow. Buying agents and exporter-financiers advance cash against a shipment, and price it for what they cannot verify themselves. For a lot of exporters, that is the only financing available.