Global Trade Identity Can Be The Cornerstone Of Paperless Trade

A single, unified digital identity for each separate player on supply and transaction chains is needed to streamline global trade, writes Henrik Hvid Jensen

- Henrik Hvid Jensen

The digital business era requires organizations involved in global trade to rethink many aspects of their business models. Several enterprises in global supply chains have moved their digitalization focus outward toward the business ecosystems they are part of. Global supply chains are therefore becoming increasingly digital, with interactions happening among several different types of private and public participants who in many cases do not know/trust each other beforehand, but need to do business together for the global trade to work.

A central requirement of such dynamic digital business networks is the ability to make trustworthy use of partners. As such, it is necessary to establish an identity infrastructure that allows participants in global trade to digitally identify and validate the trustworthiness of their partners.

So a common digital Global Trade Identity (GTID) for government and business is a foundational element for the digitization of global trade. Without this, hidden costs and digitization barriers will remain.

GTID could enable the legal entity to use just one identity to dynamically engage in digital interactions with any other actors in global trade – instead of the current paradigm with one identity per digital service provider. The recent World Economic Forum White Paper Inclusive Deployment of Blockchain for Supply Chains Part 2 explains the GTID concept in more detail, and shows that it is technically fairly simple to realize the GTID concept globally.

Here are three examples illustrating GTID’s benefit to global trade