Teesside Digital Trade Testbed
Empowering Trusted, Inclusive and Practical Digital Trade


Professor David Hughes, Teesside University


“The Teesside Digital Trade Testbed (DTT) is the UK’s first real-world testing and simulation environment dedicated to international digital trade”

The Teesside Digital Trade Testbed (DTT) is the UK’s first real-world testing and simulation environment dedicated to international digital trade. Operated by Teesside University and based at Teesside International Airport, part of Teesside Freeport, the Testbed is supported by the UK Freeport Innovation Fund and Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA) to drive innovation in digital trade technologies that make cross-border trade faster, cheaper, and more secure for businesses of all sizes.

Our mission is to work with government, industry, and technology partners to prove what works. We don’t build new trade platforms, we validate, experiment with, and demonstrate them. We bring together real containers, customs processes, and business data to simulate and showcase future-ready trade systems in a live test environment, using real goods, real data, and real constraints.

“Our goal is to ensure that any business—large or small—can engage in digital trade using trusted, standards-based tools that reduce paperwork, speed up customs, and improve access to finance.”
— Prof. David Hughes, Director, Teesside Digital Trade Testbed[HD(1] 

At its core, the Testbed is a commitment to building inclusive, practical systems that work for everyone—from digitally advanced multinationals to SMEs taking their first steps in export. UK SMEs face high compliance costs, opaque requirements, and barriers to trade finance, meanwhile, developing economies often face even steeper challenges. The DTT provides a safe, standards-aligned space to test and adopt innovations based on UNCITRAL’s MLETR, UN/CEFACT standards, and the UK’s Electronic Trade Documents Act (ETDA).

But digital trade goes far beyond going paperless. Under the policy leadership of Dr Martina Ferracane, an international expert on services trade and digital regulation, the DTT also focuses on the broader architecture of digital trade—including data flows, cross-border digital platforms, and service exports. Martina coordinates the Digital Trade Integration (DTI) policy database (https://dti.eui.eu), which tracks digital trade regulations across 100+ countries, ensuring our work is grounded in real-world policy context and global benchmarking. This allows us to understand where barriers remain and how the Testbed can help to overcome them.

The DTT offers a flexible and modular environment for experimentation, what we call a serious play facility. It enables end-to-end trade simulations using live goods, eInvoices, electronic Bills of Lading (eBoLs), eContracts, and digital phytosanitary certificates. These trials replicate full international trade flows, from farm to port to retail, and support the integration of customs, port, logistics, and finance systems via APIs, RPA, and AI tools.

Digital identity technologies (Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs), Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs), and Verifiable Credentials (VCs)) are used to test how trust and verification can happen securely and in real time. We also explore ESG and IoT tracking, ensuring that carbon data, cold-chain integrity, and compliance signals can travel with the goods.

Our policy simulation work enables UK departments like HMRC to test new trade policies before they go live. Meanwhile, our partners trial new digital trade tools, evaluate their effectiveness, and receive feedback from stakeholders, ranging from SME users to global compliance teams.

The DTT’s services include gov-to-gov digital corridor pilots; tool validation and benchmarking for software providers; live demonstrations for public and private audiences; and training for large businesses and SMEs to help them onboard digital tools with confidence. The Testbed also seeks to support freeport and investment strategies with trusted data models that accelerate digital readiness while maintaining regulatory integrity.

Get Involved
Whether you’re a policymaker, a digital solution provider, or a business looking to trade smarter, we invite you to partner with us.

Visit: https://www.tees.ac.uk/dtt

Contact: d.j.hughes@tees.ac.uk