PODCAST | In roadmaps we trust - Trade Treasury Payments

For decades, digital trade reform has been a tale of promising pilots, fragmented standards, and systems that don’t speak the same language. 

But the ICC Digital Standards Initiative (DSI) is changing that, not with platforms or pilots, but with semantics and trust.

In its July 2025 roadmap, ‘Digitalizing global trade: A roadmap to interoperability and trust at scale’, the ICC DSI outlines a blueprint to bridge the gaps between digital islands. The paper wants data to flow like water, by permission, by design, and with embedded trust.

Since its launch in 2020, the ICC Digital Standards Initiative (DSI) has sought to solve trade’s digital island problem by focusing on four strategic pillars: legal reform, standards alignment, digital trust, and capacity building. 

In 2021, it began mapping the 36 key trade documents that drive most cross-border transactions, leading to the development of the Key Trade Documents & Data Elements (KTDDE) framework. 

By 2023, DSI had launched the first implementation guides (KIGs), allowing technical teams to translate between competing standards without needing to overhaul their internal systems. 

Alongside this, the DSI established the Reliability Assessment Framework, helping platforms prove they can support legally recognised electronic trade documents under frameworks like MLETR. 

Now, in 2025, with 10 countries having adopted MLETR laws and economies representing over 70% of global GDP moving toward legal and semantic interoperability, the DSI’s focus has shifted to execution. 

The roadmap published in July 2025 marks the first public attempt to define the interoperability “layer” akin to TCP/IP for trade. This paper is launched ahead of a WTO-hosted event convening this September, that will bring together ERP vendors, infrastructure providers, and policymakers together to align on the next phase.

Pamela Mar, Managing Director of the ICC DSI and a member of the TTP Editorial Board, joined a recent TTP podcast to discuss the vision. “Everyone agrees on the end goal,” she says. “Seamless data exchange, insights, and financing. But there’s still massive divergence on how to get there.”

This is where the DSI roadmap steps in. Rather than chasing the impossible task of aligning 160 million businesses, the roadmap zooms in on the handful of actors, governments, ERP providers, standards bodies, and infrastructure players, that can actually drive systemic change. “It’s not just about who signs the laws. It’s who controls the data plumbing,” says Oswald Kuyler, senior digital trade advisor at the Asian Development Bank and a member of TTP’s Global Advisory Panel.

KTDDE, KIGs and the TCP/IP of Trade

At the heart of the roadmap is the KTDDE, the Key Trade Documents and Data Elements framework. It breaks down 36 core trade documents into 189 recurring data elements, offering a way to map what is truly shared and critical across the trade ecosystem. It is, in short, the beginnings of a shared semantic layer.

But semantics alone won’t make systems interoperable. That’s where the KIGs (KTDDE Implementation Guides) come in, developer-to-developer blueprints designed to translate between standards and systems. As Kuyler puts it: “No one is asking Oracle or SAP to change their data structures. We’re giving them the tools to transform data on export, so it’s immediately understandable to others.”

The analogy is TCP/IP, the foundational internet protocols. Just as those standards enabled networked communication across incompatible systems, the DSI’s vision is to embed a “trust protocol” into trade data using portable digital identities (like the LEI), reliability assessment frameworks, timestamps, e-signatures and digital seals.

These trust services, if recognised across platforms, would finally allow digital documents to be acted upon without manual intervention.

No more OCR workarounds

The goal is not to digitise documents for the sake of scanning or storage. “A PDF is not a digital document. It’s a static image that still requires a human to re-key the data,” Mar notes. The real shift comes when data is exchanged in a machine-readable, interoperable, and trustworthy way, what the paper calls “no-touch” trade. In this world, a customs official or a bank no longer verifies a document, but verifies a dataset embedded with cryptographic proof and compliance-ready fields.

The September Test

That’s exactly what ICC DSI is planning. This September, in partnership with the WTO and ADB, the initiative will bring major ERP and IT infrastructure players together in Geneva to begin building the missing bridges. “This isn’t just another report,” says Kuyler. “We’re translating this into implementation guides written by developers, for developers.”

The hope is to spark a wave of upgrades that make trade data interoperable by default, through alignment with a shared language and trust framework.

For years, paper remained the global default for trade not because it was efficient, but because it was interoperable. The ICC DSI roadmap now proposes a successor to paper, a resilient backbone that can carry the full weight of modern, inclusive commerce.

As Mar warns, “We need to move the conversation from six-month ROI calculations to long-term system design. Only then will digital trade truly scale.”