Your Biggest Trade Risk Might Be on Vacation

Imagine your most experienced trader switches off their phone for a week.

Could someone else establish exactly where every live deal stands? Which terms changed? What the buyer accepted? Which document is holding up the next step?

Or would the business spend Monday morning trying to reconstruct Friday afternoon?

That is the test I would put to any trading business that describes someone as indispensable. Their judgement may deserve that description. Should access to the transaction depend on them too?

The hidden job inside the job

The administrative burden is hardly imaginary. Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index, based on a survey of 31,000 people across 31 countries, found that 62% struggled with spending too much time searching for information. That is a cross-industry finding, rather than a measurement of traders. But it raises an uncomfortable question: how much expensive expertise is being consumed by finding out what happened?

Consider a hypothetical transaction. The buyer requests a revised specification. The supplier agrees, subject to a different delivery date. The freight forwarder needs updated instructions. A payment condition still refers to the original documents.

Someone has to connect those changes.

If that someone is your best commercial operator, ask what you are paying them to do.

Evaluate counterparties and negotiate profitable business? Or maintain a mental index of emails, attachments and promises?

My argument is that the second job deserves proper infrastructure.

A PDF isn’t a coordinated transaction

There is evidence that trade’s digital progress still leaves considerable fragmentation.

The FIT Alliance’s October 2026 survey found that 51.1% of its 190 respondents used electronic bills of lading in some capacity. Just 11.2% used them exclusively. Interoperability and platform fragmentation emerged as the most-cited concern.

Those are respondent adoption figures, not the percentage of world trade conducted electronically. Even so, the message matters: introducing digital documents does not automatically make the surrounding organisations and systems work together.

The OECD’s analysis of trade-document digitalisation reinforces that point. Of 36 key documents examined by the ICC Digital Standards Initiative, 21 already had standardised electronic versions, six had multiple electronic standards lacking interoperability, and nine were at early stages of standards development.

Against that backdrop, I would challenge any claim that moving attachments into a shared folder constitutes transformation.

The practical test should be whether authorised participants can answer:

• What has actually been agreed, and which changes remain proposals?

• What must happen next, who owns it, and what is blocking progress?

• Which documents support the current agreement?

Those are the questions I would use to judge a platform’s usefulness.

Give expertise somewhere to compound

There is a concrete example of what better information coordination can achieve.

In the ICC’s 2024 collection of 22 trade-digitalisation case studies, coffee trader SUCAFINA reported that standardised data had streamlined shipping, reduced email exchanges and processing times, and freed attention for continuous improvement.

That is an instructive ambition: give skilled people more capacity to improve the business.

My reading is that the strongest case for trade technology starts with the work experienced operators already understand. Capture recurring requirements. Make responsibilities explicit. Preserve the decisions and documentation that explain how a transaction reached its current state.

Then ask whether the next deal benefits from what the business learned on the last one.

The financial stakes justify serious attention. McKinsey’s 2022 analysis estimated that full adoption of electronic bills of lading could save stakeholders $6.5 billion annually in direct costs. That is a modelled industry opportunity, not a promised saving for an individual business. But it demonstrates the economic weight of even one document workflow.

Build around the deal

The ICC’s case studies also found that digitalisation can begin at different points in a supply chain and develop iteratively. That supports a practical starting point: understand a specific workflow deeply, improve it, and establish what can be repeated.

That thinking is shaping our approach at iTradeDigital. Our focus is helping experienced trading businesses negotiate and manage transactions through a shared record of agreements, progress and documentation. Working closely with operators should help us establish which capabilities belong in the common platform and where specialist services add value.

The proof will be in actual transactions: less reconstruction, clearer handovers and fewer unresolved questions about who agreed what.

Until then, here is a useful question for your next management meeting:

If your best trader disappeared for a week, would you miss their judgement—or lose track of your deals?