In 2025, most international trade flows still rely on paper documents, even though the technological and legal solutions for paperless trade already exist. The real barrier is no longer technology — it is trust and coordinated implementation.
Digital trade facilitation is rapidly becoming one of the most important directions of global economic policy. Around the world, governments, regional blocs, and businesses are moving toward paperless and data-driven trade, where transactions and processes rely on structured electronic documents – machine-readable, legally valid data objects that can be automatically processed and verified.
Recent developments – including the ratification of UNCITRAL MLETR, CPTA, and DEPA – mark an important milestone, demonstrating that digital trade frameworks are entering a new phase of maturity.
This is a very positive step forward, yet true success in cross-border paperless trade can only emerge when at least two countries move in sync — legally, technically, and institutionally. This requires developing common practices for both B2B (business-to-business) and B2G (business-to-government) processes, including customs procedures, verification mechanisms, and the legal treatment of electronic documents. It also requires a clear legal definition of what is meant by “trusted data.”
Such a definition must be codified in legislation and aligned with internationally interoperable frameworks. Countries may differ in how they regulate personal data, AI systems, or electronic record retention — yet they must jointly and clearly define what constitutes trusted data. This becomes the foundation for using reliable data across borders and later serves as a reference point in arbitration and dispute resolution.
At the European level, a proposal has been put forward to establish the European Trade Indexes Registry (EUTIR) as a Strategic EU Infrastructure, designed to manage metadata related to electronic trade documents and ensure their legal traceability. On a global level, a conceptually related system — the Trust Trade Indexes Registry (TTIR) — could eventually emerge, providing a legal and technical framework for global cooperation, based on the EUTIR concept.
These proposed and conceptual initiatives illustrate how, in the future, electronic documents and data could become legally trustworthy, technically verifiable, and internationally recognized.
1. Ratification – Establishing a Global Legal Foundation
The first step is the ratification of international legal instruments that enable the full legal recognition of structured electronic documents and digital signatures. The UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR) has become the global legal framework referenced by ASEAN, APEC, the G7, and the WTO.
Ratifcation means not merely endorsing an international principle, but integrating its core provisions into national legislation, ensuring that electronic documents have the same legal standing as their paper counterparts. In practice, this involves adapting existing laws on evidence, signatures, and trade documentation to align with MLETR principles, thereby establishing a legally enforceable foundation for paperless trade.
However, there is an important policy trap that many countries face. If national legislation directly embeds a specific technology or data format, it risks becoming obsolete as innovation advances. Amending such laws later can be slow, politically complex, and costly for both the public and private sectors.
By contrast, frameworks like MLETR, DEPA, and CPTA emphasize technological neutrality – they define legal outcomes rather than technical means. This approach allows governments to evolve their systems, adopt new digital standards, and ensure long-term interoperability without rewriting the law each time technology changes.
This combination of ratification and flexibility is the real cornerstone of a sustainable digital trade environment.
2. Integration into Free Trade Agreements
The next step is to integrate these principles into Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) so that digital trade provisions become legally binding. Recent agreements such as DEPA and CPTPP have already demonstrated how digital trade can be embedded within broader economic integration.
Such agreements strengthen trust, transparency, and the free flow of electronic documents across borders, linking legal and technical cooperation to measurable economic outcomes. Within the framework of FTAs, it is also possible to harmonize the definition and obligations related to trusted data, enabling mutual recognition of electronic documents, their provenance, and authentication mechanisms.
At the same time, FTAs serve as a practical measure of political commitment to digital trade facilitation — showing whether countries are moving from strategic intent to implementation. As often noted, only then can digitalisation deliver real, interoperable impact across borders — and demonstrate that policymakers are truly committed and engaged in driving this agenda forward.
3. Joint Technical Working Groups and Pilot Projects
At the global level, coordinated technical collaboration is essential — linking both B2B and B2G processes. Joint working groups and cross-border pilot projects help align digital identity systems, certification processes, and the exchange of electronic documents, as well as customs and regulatory control mechanisms, to achieve practical interoperability.
Through pilots, countries must develop jointly agreed common practices, enabling them to test and compare various data exchange models – such as the 4-corner model with a National Single Window architecture, or the Verifiable Credential Data Exchange model, where data exchange relies on verifiable and auditable credentials. This multi-model approach allows each country to choose the most suitable technical implementation while maintaining a shared understanding of trusted data and its legal validity.
Pilot projects are essential not only to test technical solutions but also to assess legal and institutional readiness — identifying which laws, authorities, and control mechanisms actually work in a cross-border context.
Such cooperation helps validate trusted data flows, ensuring that the receiving country has both the legal certainty and the technical capacity to recognize them. Coordinated B2B and B2G practices are therefore critical to avoiding redundant checks and strengthening mutual trust between systems.
For smaller and developing economies, these collaborative pilots are particularly valuable, as they enable participation in global value chains and digital markets, while building national capacity to govern and oversee cross-border data flows.
4. Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs)
Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs) become crucial where countries’ legal frameworks, standards, or technical systems differ. When both parties use the same international standards and interoperable trust frameworks – for example, the UNCITRAL MLETR principles or an equivalent infrastructure for validating electronic signatures and documents – recognition typically occurs automatically, without a formal agreement.
In practice, however, countries advance at different speeds. When one country uses its own document structure, certification standards, or data retention rules, an MRA acts as a legal bridge, allowing for the mutual validity of electronic documents and data, even when systems differ.
Such an agreement is essentially a political-legal guarantee:
“Although our legal and technical systems are not identical, we recognize your electronically signed and authenticated documents as valid, as if they were created under our own system.”
MRAs ensure that electronic documents, certificates, and signatures remain valid across jurisdictions, avoiding duplicate verification and manual checks. They reduce bureaucracy, streamline customs and logistics, and create a trust framework between countries with different levels of digital maturity.
Therefore, MRAs are not universally required, but are especially valuable during transitional phases — until common standards and interoperable systems are established. In the long run, as international harmonization advances, the role of MRAs will naturally diminish.
In practice, MRAs have proven particularly effective in agriculture, food safety, and medical supply chains, where rapid verification of document authenticity and provenance directly impacts efficiency and safety.
5. Implementing Digital Solutions in Business
The real impact of digital trade materializes only when private enterprises adopt digital solutions — such as electronic certificates of origin, e-invoicing systems, e-customs, and e-logistics platforms.
For businesses, this represents tangible savings in time and cost, as well as compliance with rising ESG and transparency standards in global markets. The concept of trusted data also enables participation in trust networks, where the authenticity and integrity of electronic documents are preconditions for automated decision-making and cross-border interoperability.
6. Support and Legal Empowerment by Competent Authorities
Finally, competent authorities – customs, trade ministries, and standards bodies – must endorse and legally support these systems. Only then do digital processes evolve into a legally enforceable and accountable infrastructure that businesses can reliably operate within.
Without institutional backing, digitalisation risks remaining a technological experiment rather than a policy achievement. The role of competent authorities must extend beyond recognition – they must actively engage in international standardization and trust framework development, including participation in bodies such as UN/CEFACT, the WCO Data Model, and the Digital Trade Transformation Forum (DTTF).
At the same time, it is important to recognize that the private sector adopts or develops electronic solutions primarily to optimize its own business processes – not to comply with yet another government declaration. The real success of digitalisation comes when government systems can seamlessly gather all necessary information in the background, supporting supervision and reporting without interfering with the natural flow of business. In such a model, both sides fully achieve their goals: the private sector gains efficiency and competitiveness, while the public sector obtains reliable, real-time data for governance.
Governments must also ensure that the concept of trusted data is clearly defined in law, referencing suitable international frameworks, and that its implementation aligns with emerging architectures such as EUTIR and TTIR, as envisioned at the conceptual level.
7. Financing and Sustainability of Trust Processes
Building trust in digital trade requires more than strong legal frameworks and competent authorities — it also demands sustainable financing. Political priorities and funding mechanisms often determine which technologies advance and which remain at the margins. When financing is unstable or narrowly directed, even well-designed trust frameworks struggle to scale beyond initial pilots. Ensuring balanced political commitment and transparent financial instruments is therefore essential to create genuine trust in the system.
To maintain momentum, funding must go beyond pilot implementation. It should include long-term support processes, such as capacity-building, training, and the preparation of educational and informational materials in local languages. These activities not only help businesses and administrations understand new digital procedures but also strengthen their confidence to apply them independently.
Finally, trust becomes sustainable only when financial continuity aligns with inclusive participation. Stable financing enables consistent engagement between public authorities, SMEs, and civil society, ensuring that digital trade systems evolve with real user needs rather than top-down mandates. A financing approach that recognises this dynamic is the foundation for lasting digital trust.
Global Perspective and Policy Responsibility
The future of digital trade depends on how seriously governments, international organizations, and the private sector commit to coordinated, trust-based cooperation.
A shared understanding of what constitutes trusted data will be the cornerstone of future interoperability and the realization of digital trade’s full potential.
Therefore, regional initiatives such as the DEPA, APEC Digital Trade Framework, and the forthcoming EU–ASEAN Digital Partnership should focus not on creating new standards, but on implementing existing trust mechanisms and harmonizing common practices. Only then will digital trade evolve from a strategic vision into operational reality.
By Riho Vedler, DigitalTrade4.EU