Over the past couple of months, something quite meaningful happened in the UK trade space. A series of reports and research studies have been published, each exploring a different aspect of SME trade and trade digitalisation.
The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) released qualitative research examining SME capability and the adoption of Electronic Trade Documents, while also publishing the latest findings from its Digital Trade Corridors pilots, demonstrating how digital trade performs in live trading environments. Around the same time, the London School of Economics (LSE) brought together a global evidence on trade digitalisation. And last month at Transform, we recently published a whitepaper, The Nervous Trader, covering what businesses say about the services and digital experiences that support international trade.
At first glance, these reports appear to be asking slightly different questions. One explores SME behaviour, another reviews international evidence, another evaluates operational pilots, while ours focuses on the trader experience. Yet, when read together, they reveal something really interesting. Despite their different methodologies and objectives, they point towards a remarkably consistent set of conclusions about where the real challenges now lie. The conversation around trade digitalisation is evolving, marking an important shift in thinking. We asked our Director of Trade and Growth, Jose Puyana, to reflect on these findings. He believes they point towards four important conclusions:
1. The SME question
For a long time, the narrative has suggested that SMEs are slow to adopt digital tools because they lack capability or are resistant to change. The evidence tells a rather different story.
The Ipsos research funded by DBT found that many SMEs are already using digital tools every day. They create invoices electronically, upload customs information through courier portals and exchange documents digitally with customers and logistics providers. Indeed, many hadn't heard of the Electronic Trade Documents Act (ETDA), or the wider policy agenda behind it. The LSE evidence review reinforces this. Expert interviews concluded that smaller businesses can often adopt new ways of working more quickly than larger organisations because decisions tend to sit with owners or senior leaders rather than passing through multiple governance layers.
What businesses struggle with is something else entirely. They need to understand which digital solutions are relevant to them, how they fit into existing ways of working and whether the effort of adopting them will genuinely reduce complexity rather than add to it. The challenge isn't persuading SMEs that these tools or solutions matter, it's making them accessible enough so they can use them with confidence.
2. Confidence is emerging as the missing ingredient
Although only one report explicitly talks about trade confidence, the most interesting observation is that all of them describe different aspects of the same underlying issue.
In The Nervous Trader, we describe businesses worrying about getting things wrong. They understand their products and their customers, but they feel exposed when navigating customs requirements, changing regulations and fragmented government services. Confidence, rather than capability, becomes the limiting factor.
The Ipsos research arrives at a remarkably similar conclusion through a different route. Rather than turning first to official guidance, many SMEs rely on freight forwarders, Chambers of Commerce and even competitors through online forums to understand customs requirements. Businesses are consistently asking for simpler guidance, practical checklists and a single place to understand what applies to their particular circumstances. Freight forwarders and customs intermediaries perform a vital role and will continue to do so, but when smaller businesses feel they cannot even begin exporting without external support, that perception becomes a barrier in its own right. Confidence is effectively being outsourced rather than built within the business.
Taken together, these findings suggest that we should perhaps spend less time asking how much information we publish and more time asking whether businesses actually feel equipped to act on it.
3. Adoption, adoption, adoption
The figures presented in the LSE review demonstrate why this matters. The potential economic benefits of trade digitalisation remain enormous. It could unlock up to £25 billion in additional SME trade, reduce transaction costs by up to 80% and cross-border processing times from 25 days to just one day. Yet, despite many years of effort, only around 1 to 2% of global trade documents are fully digital, while fewer than 4% of Bills of Lading are electronic. That contrast is striking. The opportunity is well understood: the technology exists, legal foundations continue to improve, yet widespread adoption remains stubbornly low.
The Digital Trade Corridors pilots in Europe help explain why. They move the discussion beyond theory and into practice. One SME reduced administration time by around 50%, saving approximately 4 hours per shipment, while reducing paper documentation by 90%. Another demonstrated that even where digital processes improved internal efficiency, the overall journey was still constrained by paper requirements, interoperability challenges and differing expectations across the wider supply chain.
The technology delivered measurable benefits in both cases. What ultimately determined the value businesses realised was the readiness of the ecosystem around them. This means the challenge is, increasingly, about creating the conditions that allow businesses to adopt technology with confidence.
4. Businesses experience one trading journey
The final theme running consistently through all of this research is fragmentation (which isn’t new). Each report describes it slightly differently. The Ipsos research highlights fragmented guidance, and the difficulty businesses have finding relevant information. The LSE review points to fragmented digital platforms and a lack of common standards. The Digital Trade Corridor pilots identify fragmented workflows and repeated handling of the same information. In The Nervous Trader, we describe fragmented services and disconnected user journeys.
Although each report uses different language, they're all describing the same reality. Businesses don't experience trade through individual government departments, technology platforms or policy initiatives. They experience one trading journey. Every time they move between disconnected services, re-enter information or struggle to understand which rules apply to them, the burden sits with the trader rather than the system. None of this is entirely new, but it's striking that four independent pieces of research, published within the space of just a few weeks, all arrive at essentially the same conclusion. That consistency suggests we are no longer looking at isolated observations, but at a clear direction of travel.
The focus of our conversations should be increasingly about interoperability, and about creating connected journeys that reduce effort, improve trust and allow businesses to focus on trading rather than navigating complex government structures.
A shared direction of travel
This summer of research demonstrates that government, academia, and industry are increasingly converging around the same conclusion. Read individually, each of these reports makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of trade digitalisation. Together, they tell a really important story: the challenge facing SMEs is no longer whether trade can be digitised, but whether it can be made simple enough, connected enough and trustworthy enough for businesses to adopt with confidence. That requires us to think beyond individual technologies or policy initiatives and instead focus on the end-to-end journeys businesses experience, improving interoperability across the trade ecosystem and recognising that confidence should sit at the heart of everything we design.
If these findings resonate with the challenges you’re experiencing in your organisation, our Director of Trade & Growth, Jose Puyana, is always happy to compare notes and perspectives.