The Asian Development Bank's Global Trade Finance Gap Survey, published in December 2025, puts the global trade finance gap at $2.5 trillion, about 10 percent of world trade and unchanged from its 2023 survey. The gap is the value of trade finance that companies ask for and banks decline. In the same survey, small and medium firms reported a 41 percent rejection rate, against 40 percent for large and mid-sized companies. The ADB says that near-parity needs more research before anyone reads much into it.
The same survey found that 84 percent of responding banks already use AI for fraud prevention and risk analysis. So the question for Asian exporters, banks, and platform builders is no longer whether technology belongs in trade finance. It is which parts of the process it has actually changed, and which experiments failed.
Where a letter of credit loses time
An illustrative example, with no real figures: a garment maker in Vietnam ships to a buyer in Europe under a letter of credit. To get paid, it must present a commercial invoice, a bill of lading, a certificate of origin, an inspection certificate, and an insurance document. Each must match the credit's terms exactly. A misspelled port name or a date outside the window counts as a discrepancy, and the bank can refuse to pay until it is fixed or waived.
Discrepancies on first presentation are common enough that the ICC Banking Commission issued a technical briefing in 2022 on how to reduce them. Every refusal adds days while documents are corrected and sent again, by courier if they are paper. For a small exporter, those days are unfunded working capital.
Two technologies address this directly: electronic documents, and software that checks documents before they are presented.
Electronic bills of lading
The bill of lading is the hardest document to digitize because it is a document of title. Whoever holds the original controls the goods. Paper originals travel by courier and can arrive after the ship does.
In February 2023, the nine ocean carriers in the Digital Container Shipping Association committed to issue half of their bills of lading electronically within five years and all of them by 2030. The DCSA's own baseline shows how far that is from today's practice: in 2021, about 1.2 percent of bills of lading were electronic.
The law decides how fast electronic documents spread
An electronic bill of lading only works if the courts in the relevant country treat it as equal to paper. The template for that is UNCITRAL's Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR).
Singapore was the first major trading hub to adopt it. Its amended Electronic Transactions Act took effect on 19 March 2021 and gives electronic bills of lading, bills of exchange, and promissory notes the same standing as paper.
As of November 2026, UNCITRAL's status page lists 13 jurisdictions with legislation based on or influenced by the Model Law. In Asia and the Pacific these are Singapore (2021), Kiribati (2021), Papua New Guinea (2022), Timor-Leste (2024), the Marshall Islands (2025), and China (2025, influenced by the Model Law and covering bills of lading only). China's revised Maritime Code, adopted in October 2025, took effect on 1 May 2026 and adds a section on electronic transport records. The page also lists Bahrain, Abu Dhabi Global Market, Belize, France, Mauritius, Paraguay, and the United Kingdom.
India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh are not on the list. For an exporter in one of those countries, an electronic bill of lading may be accepted by the carrier and the buyer's bank, and still raise a legal question at home. Ask a trade lawyer in each country on the route before you move a corridor off paper.
AI document checking
Document checking is pattern matching against a written standard: the credit's terms and the ICC's rules for documentary credits. That makes it a good fit for software that reads documents and flags mismatches before they reach the bank.
The best place for it is before presentation, on the exporter's or forwarder's side. A flagged discrepancy fixed before submission costs minutes. The same discrepancy found by the bank costs a refusal cycle.
Two rules keep it safe. A person reviews every flag and every pass before documents go out. And the tool's error rate is measured on your own documents, against a sample checked by an experienced documentary credit specialist, before anyone relies on it.
Credit for exporters without balance sheets
The other slow step is the credit decision. Many small Asian exporters have completed trades but no audited accounts. Two approaches lend against the trade instead of the balance sheet.
- Scoring the trade data. In September 2019, Tradeteq launched a machine-learning credit scoring service on Singapore's national trade platform, built to score the companies and receivables in a supply chain. Singapore-based Incomlend runs an invoice-finance marketplace where institutional investors fund exporters' trade invoices; it holds a Capital Markets Services license from Singapore's regulator.
- Lending against the buyer. In supply chain finance, a large buyer approves a supplier's invoice and a funder pays the supplier early, priced on the buyer's credit. Direct suppliers benefit most, because the buyer approves their invoices. The ADB's 2025 survey names deep-tier supply chain finance, which reaches the suppliers' own suppliers, as one of its recommendations.
Both depend on clean, structured trade data. If your invoices, purchase orders, and shipping events sit in email and spreadsheets, that is the first thing to fix.
What the blockchain networks taught
Three of the best-funded attempts to put trade on shared ledgers have closed.
- Marco Polo, a network for receivables and payables finance on distributed ledger technology, entered insolvency in early 2023 after failing to secure new funding.
- Contour, a letter-of-credit network owned by a group of large banks, announced in October 2023 that it would close after its bank shareholders stopped funding it. It shut on 30 November 2023. Finextra later reported that Xalts agreed to acquire the network.
- TradeLens, the shipping platform built by IBM and Maersk, also closed.
Contour and Marco Polo both closed when their backers stopped funding them, before enough users paid for the service. Electronic documents spread when the law recognizes them and when counterparties use the same standard, whatever database sits underneath. If you are evaluating a trade platform, ask how many of your actual counterparties are already on it, and what happens to your records if it closes.
Where the work is left
- Smaller markets. Exporters in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh work in countries that are not on the MLETR list, so electronic documents carry legal uncertainty at home.
- Agriculture. Farmers, cooperatives, and processors run seasonal working capital cycles that standard supply chain finance does not fit well.
- Intra-Asian SME trade. Small firms trading within Southeast Asia need finance, payment, and documents built for regional flows, not adapted from long-haul corridors.
If you finance or run trade in Asia, start with an inventory. List each document in your top three corridors, whether it is paper or electronic, and whether the law at both ends recognizes the electronic version. Then pick the one step, document checking or credit, where your records are already clean enough to automate, and pilot that first.
GradeCircle builds and runs six products of its own: AfroSynergy, CallerBridge, HealthSquire, Heyzl, Lexfora, and LukeAPI, two of them in beta. The assumptions in our models come from operating those systems, not from a framework. See what we run.
If you are building or scaling in these markets, see how GradeCircle approaches AI implementation.
