Business, Freight News, IT


Electronic bills of lading adoption increases, says survey

[ October 22, 2026   //   ]

Electronic bills of lading (eBL) adoption reached 51.1%, up from 49.2% in 2024 and 33.0% in 2022, according to the latest survey by the Future of International Trade (FIT) alliance which brings together ICC, BIMCO, DCSA, FIATA and Swift.

The share of respondents using eBLs exclusively rose to 11.2%, up from 7.5% in 2024.

Respondents ranked 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, reduced paper use and lower transport emissions.

Interoperability and platform fragmentation emerged as the single most-cited concern, followed by legal effectiveness and authenticity verification, and implementation and onboarding at scale.

However, banking adoption remains limited, with 22.2% reporting at least partial eBL use, broadly unchanged from 21.1% in 2024. Banks require legal, technical, and network-level assurance that control, status, and transfer of an eBL can be verified as it moves across the system, rather than merely within a single platform — pointing again to interoperability as a constraint on scaled adoption.

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.

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.

The 2026 FIT Alliance eBL Survey draws on 190 cleaned survey records collected through its member networks. Data compilation and analytics were conducted by Shanghai Maritime University with interpretive analysis co-authored with the Digital Supply Chain Institute (DSCI).

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