The 4 Billion Pieces of Paper Keeping Global Trade Afloat

The vast majority of trade is conducted using paper documents, but fraud is fueling a clamor to digitize the system. 

“It’s the easiest type of fraud to commit,” said Neil Shonhard, chief executive officer of anti-fraud platform MonetaGo, “either falsifying a document or sending duplicates to banks ‘A’ ‘B’ and ‘C’ without them speaking to each other.” The ICC said in a 2022 report, co-authored by MonetaGo, that as much as $2.5 billion of those annual fraud costs ended up realized as losses for financiers — unearthed by commodity price shocks or other external events. “We’re still at such a nascent point in international trade, with only a small fraction of global trade being digitized — we need oxygen and this is oxygen.”

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