Trade and Supply Chain Finance
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White Paper on Universal Trusted Credentials (UTC): Transforming Access to Finance for MSMEs and Beyond
Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) are the building blocks of every nation’s economy, accounting for up to 90% of businesses and 70% of employment worldwide.1 Unsurprisingly, SME development has become a key priority for many governments, as evidenced by UNDP’s extensive country-level work in that field, around the world. Yet, globally, MSMEs still face… Read more
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Blueprint Paper on Digital Trade and the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records
For centuries, as the backbone of the global economy, domestic and international trade, and trade finance, have driven business practices that evolved into legal norms. These have been conducted and recorded in vast numbers of paper-based documents, the exchange of which continues to be mostly done physically. This paper-based process has many deficiencies and inefficiencies.… Read more
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Verifiable Trust: A Foundational Digital Layer Underpinning the Physical, Financial, and Information Supply Chain
Digital trade, or the application of digital technologies to trade and supply chain processes, is an opportunity to drive efficiency, speed, and resilience for companies, industries and countries that rely on trade for growth. The pace of technological advancement, and the falling cost of computing power and storage, now make the benefits of digitally-enabled trade… Read more
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The international supply chain is growing in complexity at the same time as nation states seek to improve their border compliance for imports and facilitate access to export markets for their domestic producers. The global value chain is highly dependent on smooth cross-border supply flows (tangible, intangible and data). In an uncertain world that is… Read more
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In the era of digital transformation, supplier management and procurement came late. But over the past two years, companies have learned how vulnerable global supply chains are to disruption, making the digitisation of supplier management and procurement processes more important again. While cost reduction remains a priority, procurement needs to be more flexible and its… Read more
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International trade is associated with positive impacts on growth, and acts as a particularly important channel of positive spill-overs for SMEs, including in the area of managerial skills, technology and innovation. Access to trade finance can facilitate SME engagement in international trade by addressing two major challenges. First, both exporters and importers are exposed to… Read more
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Distributed ledger technology (DLT)1 in trade is usually used for two primary purposes: 1) track-and-trace, to enhance transparency on how goods are being processed and 2) the digitalization of trade processes. Track-and-trace itself has three main purposes. First, it can be used to increase transparency for customers and build trust. This is done by providing… Read more
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The spread of digital tools, the increased availability of data on both business and financial interactions, and the improvments in data processing capacities are all critical to the expansion of supply chain and distributor finance. Digital integration of traditional retailers/suppliers and distributors/manufacturers is a pathway for addressing working capital challenges and driving financial inclusion, as… Read more