The Digital Standards Initiative Roadmap to Interoperability: Progress to Date, and What to Look for in 2025

Pamela Mar, Managing Director, ICC Digital Standards Initiative


“Today trade documents are the building blocks of supply chain transactions, but in the future, transacting via data embedded in trade documents, could offer a more efficient, interoperable, and traceable supply chain”

“We are creating an ecosystem of data – where data generated once in a secured verified manner – then flows to different functions as anchors to other processes”

The ICC Digital Standards Initiative was founded four years ago to accelerate progress towards a digitalized, interoperable, and inclusive global trade ecosystem by solving key challenges in standards interoperability, as well as to lead the global campaign for national legal reforms to enable digital trade. 

Digital Trade Standards: Where are we today?

In April 2024, DSI completed the KTDDE framework for aligning digital versions of 36 key trade documents via their core data elements, by working with industry practitioners, standards development organizations, and multilateral bodies.  This framework is a first step towards enabling the seamless sharing of data across the supply chain by examining documents based on their core data elements and then mapping these data flows across the end to end supply chain. 

The work recognized both formal standards frameworks (e.g. WCO data model) and informal or industry-based standards.  It also incorporated key trade documents across the supply chain—whether commercial, transport, financial or compliance – into one framework, thus addressing the fragmentation of trade standards that had proliferated to date.  At the time of publication, 21 of the 36 key trade documents had already been digitalized in to various standardized formats, while 6 were in intermediate stages of digitalization, and 9 were at the starting blocks. 

What’s Next? 

Although the KTDDE framework might be useful to industry users who are just starting their digitalization journeys, more needs to be done to support users being pulled in different directions by the application of different models, standards and practices.  Imagine a small supplier with customers who use different trade platforms, each of which have their own documentary and data standards and processes.  The complexity increases as digitalization takes room, as data must be manually aligned and then uploaded, thus providing a perverse incentive against digitalization. 

To address this, the DSI KTDDE Implementation Guides (KIG) aim to facilitate alignment across data elements in multiple standardized documents so that users can automate the data interoperability process across multiple versions at scale.  The next step would be to engage ERP and IT infrastructure service providers so that that this data alignment does not need to be executed by each individual company. Standardizing data within ERPs and IT infrastructure is not only more efficient, but it crucially addresses the “first mile” and “last mile” problems which related to connectivity between ERP and trade platforms.

Users should not have to struggle –or undergo complex configuration procedures – to generate globally interoperable data: this should be default starting with their own ERP systems, and standardized data should enable connectivity across the supply chain and its service providers handling digital documents and data. The fear of users of system lock-in, as shown in many surveys on why analog processes persist despite much better technologies available, is real.  We aim to put this to rest with this next stage of the KTDDE work.  

In other words, building out the KTDDE framework is the first step in articulating just how “documents to data” might work.  Today trade documents are the building blocks of supply chain transactions, but in the future, transacting via data embedded in trade documents, could offer a more efficient, interoperable, and traceable supply chain.

KTDDE Applications: The Bank Defined Dataset

Although the creation of a KTDDE core dataset – comprising secured, authenticated data generated directly from electronic trade documents – is still a work in progress, we can already envision its possible applications beyond the supply chain.

The first application is the Bank Defined Dataset, co-developed with the ICC Banking Commission Commercialization Working Group, which identifies data elements from KTDDE that have potential utility to trade finance.  Three types of trade finance transactions were explored: documentary collections, supply chain finance, and letter of credit.  The group combed through several hundred data elements from the KTDDE to identify which ones could potentially be used by bank trade finance process, in place of paper or documentary based processes. 

The logic is that secure data directly ingested from verified trade documents or platforms, could save significant time currently used by the bank to accept, check, verify data within the trade finance process. If this process shrinks in terms of time and manpower required, then potentially banks could widen the net of transactions – to include lower value loans typically demanded of smaller clients.    

The next challenge, of course, is to align standardized elements within the Bank Defined Dataset, and then to identify ways that it can be ingested in bulk by banks in the trade finance process.  The KIGs will help, by linked data captured by software vendors to the bank defined data sets data schematic requirements.

There may be regulatory or compliance requirements that need to be addressed, and of course, the customer onboarding or KYC process would also need to be involved. But the prospect of potentially satisfying over half the data requirements of trade finance process with verified KTDDE core data makes this a worthy workstream for further development.

Sustainability Applications: GHG Emissions inventories and the KTDDE dataset

A newly forming workstream replicates the Bank Dataset work process, looking to see whether KTDDE core data could potentially meet some of the data needs required to create an GHG emissions inventory for scope three carbon footprinting.

Of the GHG Scope three inventory’s 15 different CO2 emissions sources, KTDDE could potentially hold data relevant to category 1 (purchased goods and services), category 3 (fuel), and categories 4 and 9 (upstream and downstream transportation and distribution), among others.  The question is not whether KTDDE is the only source of such data – clearly the data could be manually compiled as is the common practice currently – but rather whether the KTDDE dataset, being secure and verified, could perhaps provide efficiency or greater accuracy to the scope three data process.

Towards an Ecosystem of Data

We are creating an ecosystem of data – where data generated once in a secured verified manner – then flows to different functions as anchors to other processes. There is an efficiency gain from eliminating the checking and documentation processes, as well as an accuracy gain, especially in the supply chain where complexity often outweighs the resources allocated to carbon footprinting.

DSI thus continues to develop the KTDDE framework, with a focus on interoperability and alignment amongst the world of standards, and in 2025 with a focus on the “first mile” and “last mile” data journeys.  In concert, we will also deploy our public and private sector networks to address the other opportunity areas in the world of supply chain data.