Digital trade
Joint statement on the results of the 2026 global survey on electronic Bills of Lading (eBL) by the FIT Alliance, co-founded by ICC, BIMCO, DCSA, FIATA and Swift. Conducted in partnership with Shanghai Maritime University and the Digital Supply Chain Institute (DSCI), the survey finds that the majority of respondents now use eBLs in some capacity and identifies interoperability as the defining challenge of the next phase of adoption.
The FIT Alliance today announced the results of its 2026 global survey tracking adoption of electronic Bills of Lading (eBL). The survey confirms the continued upward trajectory of eBL adoption first established in 2022 and 2024 and identifies interoperability as the defining challenge of the next phase.
Key findings:
Overall adoption — encompassing users of eBLs exclusively or alongside paper bills of lading — has risen to 51.1% of respondents, up from 33.0% in 2022 and 49.2% in 2024.
Beneath the headline figure, the composition is maturing. The share of respondents using eBLs exclusively has risen to 11.2% in 2026, up from an implied 5.0% in 2022 and 7.5% in 2024.
The business case for eBLs continues to command near-universal recognition. In 2026, 93.8% of respondents view the eBL as an enabler of broader digital transformation in trade, holding at the 94.0% level recorded in 2024 and well above the 86.0% recorded in 2022. Respondents rank faster processing as the leading benefit, followed by improved handling, data accuracy, enhanced security, cost savings through process efficiencies, and the elimination of courier costs — an ordering consistent with the 2024 findings. Environmental benefits — reduced paper use and lower transport emissions — are rated important by approximately two-thirds of respondents.
The 2026 round captured respondents’ concerns through open-ended comments rather than the fixed options used in prior rounds. Interoperability and platform fragmentation emerged as the single most-cited concern, followed by legal effectiveness and authenticity verification, and implementation and onboarding at scale. The pattern is consistent with the maturation of the legal landscape — the share of respondents flagging legal acceptance as a significant obstacle fell from 55.0% in 2022 to 42.6% in 2024 — and with the shifting of the industry’s attention from “can an eBL be legally issued” to “can it be relied upon as it moves across systems”.
The banking sector provides the clearest indication that structural challenges remain . In 2026, 22.2% of bank respondents report at least partial eBL use, essentially unchanged from the 21.1% recorded in 2024, despite a strong awareness level of 82.5% in that round. The adoption-awareness gap flagged two years ago has not closed. Banks require legal, technical, and network-level assurance that control, status, and transfer of an eBL can be verified as it moves across the ecosystem, rather than merely within a single platform — pointing again to interoperability as the operative constraint on scaled adoption.
The 2026 findings point to one strategic priority for the next cycle: interoperability.
The survey confirms that interoperability is now a central concern for scaling eBL adoption. The industry has made important progress, but the next phase must enable electronic trade documents and trusted data to move securely and efficiently across different platforms, jurisdictions and participants. This is not about imposing one solution on the market. It is about respecting the diversity of users and technical approaches while agreeing on the common standards and frameworks that allow different solutions to work together.
The model that has underpinned eBL adoption to date — in which the eBL exists as a record on a specific solution provider’s system, and movement between platforms depends on bilateral or multilateral interoperability arrangements — faces scale constraints. For eBLs to move seamlessly across the global trade corridor, the eBL itself must become portable: a structured, standards-based data object that travels between systems, jurisdictions, and participants without being bound to the platform on which it was issued.
Further sector-wide progress — particularly in banking and trade finance, where interoperability friction is most consequential — depends on this transition. The FIT Alliance and its partners are committed to advancing this collective effort and turning interoperability into a practical reality for global trade.
About the FIT Alliance
Established in February 2022, the FIT Alliance (“Future of International Trade”) brings together ICC, BIMCO, DCSA, FIATA and Swift to drive the adoption of a universal, standards-based electronic bill of lading (eBL) across all sectors of the shipping industry. The Alliance focuses on raising awareness about the benefits of digital trade, promoting interoperable data standards and harmonising legislative conditions across jurisdictions.
The FIT Alliance aims to facilitate eBL acceptance and adoption among shippers, consignees, carriers, regulators, solution providers, banks and insurers, fostering seamless communication and collaboration among all stakeholders in international trade.
About the research
The 2026 FIT Alliance eBL Survey draws on 190 cleaned survey records collected through the member networks of ICC, BIMCO, DCSA, FIATA, and Swift. Data compilation and analytics were conducted by Shanghai Maritime University with interpretive analysis co-authored with the Digital Supply Chain Institute (DSCI). The 2026 instrument captured respondents’ views of barriers through open-ended comments rather than the fixed options used in prior rounds; regional and firm-size breakdowns reported in 2022 and 2024 will resume in the 2028 round following a planned instrument review.
A steady rise in the adoption of electronic Bills of Lading (eBL) has been revealed by the results of a 2024 global survey by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and other FIT Alliance co-founders BIMCO, DCSA, FIATA and SWIFT. Conducted in partnership with the HKUST Li & Fung Supply Chain Institute and the Boston […]
