Infrastructure, innovation, inclusion in digital trade

Samuel Mathew, Global Head Documentary Trade at Standard Chartered, discusses digitalisation in global trade. 

18 December 2025

6 mins

Corporate & investment bankingDigital solutionsTrade & working capital

Global trade is steadily moving towards digitalisation, but the journey is far from complete. Although ambitious technologies and new platforms have emerged, adoption remains uneven as innovation outpaces the industry’s ability to integrate these solutions across borders.

In the second episode of Trade Finance Global (TFG) and Standard Chartered’s five-episode podcast series, The Future of Trade, TFG’s Mark Abrams sat down with Sam Mathew, Managing Director and Global Head of Documentary Trade at Standard Chartered.

They explored the biggest hurdles in achieving paperless trade – from disparate systems and legacy infrastructure to the practical issues in coordinating dozens of parties across a single transaction.

“People often use digitalisation and digitisation of trade finance quite interchangeably,” said Mathew – but it’s important to distinguish the two.

Digitisation refers to converting documents into electronic form, whereas digitalisation involves redesigning the entire trade process so that contracts, shipping documents, risk checks, and settlement can move fully without paper – requiring systems that interact with one another.

Interoperability: the biggest hurdle

According to Standard Chartered’s recent report, Future of Trade: Digitalisation, 56 per cent of corporates cite interoperability as the biggest barrier to digitalisation, followed by regulatory barriers and implementation challenges. This points to a larger problem: structural fragmentation.

Trade is complex operationally. There are anywhere from four to twenty parties in a trade flow. There are multiple hands and multiple parties involved in that flow. For all of that to be fully digital, you need systems that talk to each other, or ideally all to be on the same platform.

Samuel Mathew

Managing Director and Global Head, Documentary Trade

Even when a single party digitalises internally, the chain breaks as soon as one participant is still paper-based. The problem isn’t a lack of innovation, but rather a failure of coordination.

This challenge is most apparent in electronic bills of lading (eBLs). Although their adoption would cut direct trade costs by an estimated USD6.5 billion and significantly reduce the industry’s carbon emissions, the shift hasn’t been easy.

On the multiple different providers that help shipping companies digitise their bills of lading, “It’s not practically possible for exporters, shippers, and banks to join every different platform, and the different systems don’t talk to each other,” said Mathew.

This fragmentation results in digital islands: multiple standalone platforms, none of which are interoperable. And when documents can’t move freely between systems, the entire trade flow reverts to paper.

Past blockchain-based approaches encountered similar issues, where closed, permissioned networks required all participants to join the same ecosystem.

The building block for AI

When blockchain first entered the scene, many hoped it would finally connect all parties across a transaction. But, as Mathew put it, “People quickly realised the cost was prohibitive, and getting all parties into the chain proved almost impossible.”

“I think we are at a phase where blockchain is tried and tested”, noting that attention has now shifted to newer technologies like AI. But although AI offers immense potential to automate at scale, adopting something so complex demands solid foundations.

“We know that most banks and corporations that have been around for a while have legacy systems,” Mathew said. According to a recent survey across UK banks, 66per cent of respondents categorised legacy systems as a hurdle in AI adoption.

For Mathew, AI implementation requires “getting the data and tech infrastructure right, moving them onto the cloud so they can talk to each other, and building a data lake with clean and consistent data.”

AI only works if the underlying data and infrastructure are solid. If your systems are fragmented or your datasets are messy, you’ll just get ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ That’s why banks are shifting to the cloud, which is scalable and creates the kind of unified architecture you actually need before deploying AI at scale.

It is then that AI models can be implemented and offer a more immediately scalable path. They can extract, structure, and analyse value from documents in an automated way, identify opportunities, and mitigate risk.

Digital assets and tokenisation

Beyond AI, digital assets like stablecoins and tokenised real-world assets have also been emerging as areas of progress in digitalisation. Regulatory clarity in key markets – like the US’s Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT 21) and the UK’s Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA) – have accelerated the process.

“If you look at the total USD stablecoin in circulation, it’s about 300 billion,” said Mathew. “It is slated to grow. Some forecasts in our Future of Trade: Digitalisation report show it hitting about two trillion by 2028″.

Rather than transforming trade documents first – an area still held back by interoperability gaps – Mathew believes digital assets will have a much faster impact on payments and settlement. It will be easier to introduce tokenised deposits or stablecoin-based settlement before fully digitising documents like bills of lading.

Under the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian – an initiative exploring new digital financial infrastructure – banks and industry partners have already tested the idea of turning trade assets into digital tokens and offering them to institutional investors. The early experiments showed strong interest, suggesting that trade assets could eventually be bought, sold, and distributed in more flexible digital formats.

Regulatory progress: necessary but insufficient

However, while innovation around digital assets, AI, and cloud infrastructure is taking off, regulatory frameworks haven’t fully kept up. Mathew emphasised that legal reform is essential for digital trade to scale, particularly when it comes to recognising digital trade across borders.

“Technology tends to lead regulation,” he said. “Model laws like MLETR, the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records, being adopted by local regulators is absolutely important. I think that has to happen; without it, things will not move. But it is just a necessary, not a sufficient, condition.”

MLETR enables the legal recognition and use of electronic transferable records. But despite it being crucial to meet legal standards for digitalisation to occur at scale, only twelve jurisdictions have implemented MLETR-aligned laws.

This is a small share relative to global trade flows. It means that a document recognised as electronic in one country may still need to be printed and repapered in another, which weakens the benefits of digitalisation.

The inflexion point

Despite slow regulatory progress, Mathew noted that many parts of the ecosystem are moving. Industry bodies like the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) have committed their members to adopt eBLs by 2030, which he believes will create the first real tipping point.

He also emphasised the growing interest in “trade as an asset class,” where tokenisation allows trade assets to be broken into smaller digital units and distributed more easily. These developments show that while full digitalisation is still distant, momentum is quietly building.

Together, these shifts reflect real progress. However, it’s important to recognise that the promise of technological innovation can only be fully harnessed when regulation and interoperability catch up – easing fragmentation across borders and moving the industry closer to a shared, standardised foundation for digital trade.