Electronic Trade
Documents Bill
The purpose of the Bill is to:
● Put electronic trade documents on the same legal footing as
paper documents, removing the need for wasteful paperwork and
needless bureaucracy. This will enable businesses to move from
paper-based to digital-based transactions when buying and selling
internationally. This will help business efficiency and support
economic growth.
The main benefits of the Bill would be:
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● Increasing efficiency and lowering trade
administration costs for businesses because processing
electronic documents is faster and cheaper than paper
equivalents.
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● Raising the security and compliance of trade by
utilising the transparency and traceability benefits
electronic documents offer.
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● Realising environmental benefits from reduced use of
paper and courier emissions in trade administration.
The main elements of the Bill are:
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● Bringing about much needed modernisation to
long-standing statutes such as the Bills of Exchange Act 1882
and the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act 1992.
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● Removing the legal obstacle to the use of trade
documents in digital form, and ensuring that such documents
have the same effects as paper counterparts.
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● Allowing the adoption of new digital solutions which
bypass the need for paper and wet ink signatures.
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● Ensuring that trade documents in electronic form meet
certain criteria designed to replicate the key features of
paper trade documents. These criteria include: ensuring that
an electronic document is subject to exclusive control (only
one person, or persons acting jointly, can exercise control
over it at any one time) and once transferred the previous
holder should no longer be able to exercise control over the
document.
Territorial extent and application
● This Bill will extend and apply across the UK.
Key facts
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● The Digital Container Shipping Association estimates
that if 50 per cent of the container shipping industry were
to adopt electronic bills of lading, the collective global
savings would be in the region of £3 billion. Most
respondents to the Law Commission consultation expect savings
for businesses trading internationally of at least five per
cent on transaction costs.
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● Respondents also noted that processing electronic
trade documents is much more time efficient than processing
paper documents. According to CargoX, as cited by Trade
Finance Global, transferring a paper-based trade document can
take seven to ten days, whereas processing the document
electronically will reduce this to as short as 20 seconds.
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● Digitising trade documents would reduce the estimated
28.5 billion paper trade documents currently used each year.
