Oct 6, 2026 · 20 min · 11 segments
Digital trade isn’t scaling. That’s the blunt admission from the ICC Digital Standards Initiative (DSI) as it enters a new phase to tackle fragmentation across the ecosystem. In this exclusive TTP…
And maybe to add to what Pamela's saying, I can't help but somehow feel a little bit of a parallel to our blockchain journey, where you have this exciting technology that has an enormous amount of promise.
Um, but to Pamela's point, it's kind of stepping back and going, "Well, what is this technology really good at, and how do I actually apply it?" So when you, when you think about agentic AI as an example, I mean, uh, fundamentally there's a lot that it can do really well, but what it can't do is tell you that Deepesh is Deepesh.
And ultimately, the challenge is when I go into a courtroom, I can't just say, "I trusted my agent," or I, "Agent said it was Deepesh." So I think we're in the starting, exciting, let's, let's do a lot of experiments phase, um, of the journey, but I do think we should take some of the lessons from the past to help inform what we do in this process going forward.
Perhaps we're at the, the, the, the, the, the height, the peak of inflated expectations on, on, on the garden, a hype cycle.
Let's talk about ICC DSI, and, and, and I'm gonna be honest, it, it receives mixed feedback.
[laughs] The, the truth is that, um, we looked the problem in the face, and we realized that actually digital trade isn't scaling.
Um, all of our, the industry celebration over single pilots, over the crawling advance of EBL adoption right now at 12.8%, um, it shows us that actually our current efforts and our current approach, um, are inadequate to the task at hand.
And the trade finance gap that you mentioned is actually a symptom of this, um, of this problem that trade is unequal.
Trade has a structural problem, and digitalization has the ability to actually begin to right that structural imbalance, but only if we do it in a really scalable manner.
So what's gone wrong so far is that, um, we see accelerating fragmentation, the rise of digital islands, the rise of platforms in order to connect the digital islands, um, and these solutions haven't worked.
Um, and so now is the time that the governance board, um, and DSI have basically said, "Okay, we need a new approach." We, we do have elements of the approach.
We know that we know the end-to-end supply chain, we know how standards get aligned, we know where the data is-
... um, and we know what that data has to be, what markers have to be on that data in order for it to be verifiable, um, authenticatable-
And maybe to add to what Pamela's saying, I can't help but somehow feel a little bit of a parallel to our blockchain journey, where you have this exciting technology that has an enormous amount of promise.
Um, but to Pamela's point, it's kind of stepping back and going, "Well, what is this technology really good at, and how do I actually apply it?" So when you, when you think about agentic AI as an example, I mean, uh, fundamentally there's a lot that it can do really well, but what it can't do is tell you that Deepesh is Deepesh.
And ultimately, the challenge is when I go into a courtroom, I can't just say, "I trusted my agent," or I, "Agent said it was Deepesh." So I think we're in the starting, exciting, let's, let's do a lot of experiments phase, um, of the journey, but I do think we should take some of the lessons from the past to help inform what we do in this process going forward.
Perhaps we're at the, the, the, the, the, the height, the peak of inflated expectations on, on, on the garden, a hype cycle.
Let's talk about ICC DSI, and, and, and I'm gonna be honest, it, it receives mixed feedback.
[laughs] The, the truth is that, um, we looked the problem in the face, and we realized that actually digital trade isn't scaling.
Um, all of our, the industry celebration over single pilots, over the crawling advance of EBL adoption right now at 12.8%, um, it shows us that actually our current efforts and our current approach, um, are inadequate to the task at hand.
And the trade finance gap that you mentioned is actually a symptom of this, um, of this problem that trade is unequal.
Trade has a structural problem, and digitalization has the ability to actually begin to right that structural imbalance, but only if we do it in a really scalable manner.
So what's gone wrong so far is that, um, we see accelerating fragmentation, the rise of digital islands, the rise of platforms in order to connect the digital islands, um, and these solutions haven't worked.
Um, and so now is the time that the governance board, um, and DSI have basically said, "Okay, we need a new approach." We, we do have elements of the approach.
We know that we know the end-to-end supply chain, we know how standards get aligned, we know where the data is-
... um, and we know what that data has to be, what markers have to be on that data in order for it to be verifiable, um, authenticatable-
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