ICC – renowned for its global standards that enable trillions of dollars of cross-border transactions each year – has announced the operational launch of a major new initiative to ensure the benefits of digital trade can be realised by everyone, everywhere.
The ICC Digital Standards Initiative (DSI) will work towards the ambitious aim of establishing a globally harmonised, digitised trade environment – directly addressing disruptions experienced during the COVID-19 crisis as a result of the reliance of trade flows on paper documentation.
Although the workplace implications of the pandemic have accelerated adoption of digital technologies, significant barriers remain to the digitisation of trade-related processes. Outdated regulatory environments frequently force businesses to use hard-copy documents to satisfy local legal requirements when transacting across borders; while the cost implications of siloed – and often incompatible – industry initiatives discourage adoption of digital systems by micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises.
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