Bridging ambition and infrastructure: Digital trade pathways across the Commonwealth
At the inaugural Commonwealth Business Summit, held alongside the Commonwealth Trade Ministers’ Meeting, Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) spoke to representatives from ICC United Kingdom, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and MonetaGo.
Courtesy Trade, Treasury, Payments
At the inaugural Commonwealth Business Summit, held alongside the Commonwealth Trade Ministers’ Meeting, Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) spoke to representatives from ICC United Kingdom, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and MonetaGo to discuss the intersection of trade digitalisation, multilateral development, and institutional alignment.
The conversation examined how shared frameworks (whether legal, institutional, or technological) could underpin the next phase of global trade integration, particularly across Commonwealth markets.
According to the conversation, digital transformation in trade will be driven by the ability of institutions to effectively coordinate and collaborate in aligning and scaling reforms across jurisdictions to harness new and emerging technologies within the global digital trade space.
The Commonwealth as a sandbox for scalable alignment
With 56 member states ranging from G7 economies to small island developing states, the Commonwealth encompasses a wide spectrum of trade profiles but shares a legacy of legal and institutional familiarity, known as “the Commonwealth Advantage”. As Chris Southworth from ICC UK said, “you’ve got two of the most trade-burdened regions in the world in the Pacific and the Caribbean… some of it’s geography, which you can’t change, but actually quite a lot of those costs you can change, and digitalisation is one way to do that.”
This diversity, while often seen as a barrier, can also be considered an asset when considered in the right context. The Commonwealth is a microcosm of global trade where scalable policy models could be trialled before broader adoption. Southworth described the Commonwealth as a glue that could connect trade blocs, suggesting that the bloc might even be used as a sandbox environment for piloting reform, given its shared legal heritage and institutional linkages.
“This aligns very well with the development of the Commonwealth Model Law on Digital Trade 2025, which offers transformative benefits for governments, businesses and consumers across member countries,” Vashti Maharaj from the Commonwealth Connectivity Agenda said. “The Model Law helps align national legal frameworks across the Commonwealth, creating a more predictable and interoperable environment for trade, lowering legal friction for businesses operating across borders, and positioning Commonwealth countries to attract investment and integrate more deeply into global value chains.”
From the EBRD’s perspective, the timing is particularly salient. As the bank starts operating in sub-Saharan Africa, beginning with three new member states that are also Commonwealth countries, it sees an opportunity to apply its institutional experience from post-Soviet market transitions.
Shona Tatchell from the EBRD said, “We’re going to be bringing a lot of our learnings from how we help countries to actually develop, and use those learnings here.”
Beyond technology: Foundations for digital trade
Turning more deeply to the topic of technology, it becomes clear that the main barriers to digital trade are institutional rather than technological.
While distributed ledgers, registries, and digital document platforms are already available and maturing, their success depends on deeper layers of legal, regulatory, and procedural alignment. These are further upheld by three foundational pillars: digital identities, legal reform, and data standards.
Neil Shonhard, CEO of MonetaGo, said, “Prevention registries, collateral registries, and other pillars of digital public infrastructure, such as digital identity and KYC, are essential to creating a safer, more liquid, and data-driven trading ecosystem.”
Legal reform is also an equally urgent priority. While English law underpins around 80% of cross-border trade documentation, the mere use of English law in a commercial contract does not guarantee enforceability for digital instruments across jurisdictions. Tatchell said, “It doesn’t necessarily mean that just because, for example, a digital negotiable instrument… is issued under the law, that it is going to be acceptable anywhere else.” This gap in recognition undermines confidence in the legal reliability of digital documents, especially for instruments like electronic bills of exchange or digital letters of credit. Maharaj added, “Through recognising this challenge, the Commonwealth Connectivity Agenda has also developed a cohesive Roadmap for legal reform that seeks to eliminate long-standing barriers that have limited the adoption of paperless trade.”
Regarding the third pillar of standardising data formats and semantic meanings, the group agreed that inconsistent definitions and misaligned data fields across systems are a significant barrier to interoperability, even where APIs and platforms exist.
Letters of credit and the limits of capital treatment
Some of the issues in trade finance, however, such as the decline of letters of credit (LCs) and the persistent financing gap for SMEs, cannot be solved solely by digitalisation.
Tatchell said, “[Letters of credit are] an amazing instrument if you think about it, because they are that balance of power between an importer and an exporter, overseen by a trusted entity like a bank.” However, she added that many of their protections “fall away if you have discrepancies,” and that digitisation could play a key role in reducing such errors by allowing amendments prior to document presentation.
More fundamentally, the group questioned whether the industry’s reliance on document-centric workflows remains fit for the purpose. “Why do we need all these documents?” Southworth asked. “Actually, just what we need is the data… if the goods have been delivered to the right policy standard, right time, right place, right value, then why shouldn’t a payment be made?”
Regarding the MSME financing gap, Tatchell said, “access to finance is impacted by capital treatment… there’s a lot around KYC and the inability to get financial statements in a form that can be easily analysed.” Until these capital treatment issues are addressed, digital platforms and trade registries (however sophisticated) will struggle to unlock liquidity at scale for the segments that need it most.
From trophy pilots to repeatable trade flows
While enthusiasm for digital trade reform is widespread, the group cautioned against an over-reliance on isolated pilot transactions. True adoption will require systems to scale, interoperate, and demonstrate tangible value through repeatable flows. Tatchell said, “We’re so beyond just doing trophy pilots that just demonstrate the use of the technology because it’s not about the technology… It’s the infrastructure, it’s the ecosystem around it.”
This view was reinforced by concerns about current fragmentation. Even as new platforms proliferate, many are built on incompatible stacks, leading to so-called four-walled gardens that do not scale across borders. Shonhard said, “we’re still very much in the age of fragmentation… because of the fact that people are still funding projects to build solutions on technology stacks that aren’t interoperable.”
Perhaps then there is a need for an institutional and cultural shift (particularly among banks, regulators, and MDBs) to move from risk avoidance to structured experimentation. Tatchell said, “If we [the EBRD] see the value in a particular innovation… we can use some of our funding to test and demonstrate that these are safe systems.”
There is no need anymore to prove that the technology can work. It already does and stakeholders already know that. The goal now to prove to institutions that they can trust the technology.
Building alignment at scale
So, what might a small win look like over the next 12–18 months? Shonhard suggested that global alignment across MDBs, trade blocs, and standard-setting bodies would be the most catalytic development. “Even if we are only talking of [the Commonwealth’s] $2 trillion trade goal by 2030,” he said, “it’s a huge step.”
MLETR adoption, integration of the Commonwealth Model Law on Digital Trade, broader DPI rollouts, and scaled testing of enforceable digital instruments are all promising fronts but the real measure of success will be measured in the number of real-world transactions that shift from paper-based to data-driven systems, and in the level of trust that institutions, governments, and markets are willing to place in them.
