Competitive Advantages Through Paperless Trade

As Gordon Gekko famously said in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street: “The most valuable commodity is information.” Digital trade processes deliver exactly that in real time. According to KPMG, paperless trade can increase profitability by up to 15 percent, reduce trade-related costs by 76 percent and generate more than USD 200 billion in global savings. These figures show the scale at which digital trade processes can influence liquidity and risk management (see KPMG AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft (2026): Creating competitive advantages through paperless trade, p. 10-11). 

In a financial world increasingly shaped by digitalization and regulation, paperless trade is becoming essential. Experts and leaders in Treasury & Finance face new challenges and trends that demand efficient and cost‑effective processes. The latest KPMG whitepaper “Creating competitive advantages through paperless trade” explains how digital trade processes generate competitive benefits and provides valuable insights for treasury teams and risk functions.

A look at today’s global trade landscape reveals that roughly 90 percent of transactions are still paper-based (see KPMG AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft (2026): Creating competitive advantages through paperless trade, p. 10). For treasury teams, the key tasks remain optimizing liquidity, minimizing risks and meeting regulatory requirements. Manual document handling leads to long processing times and limited real-time transparency, highlighting the urgent need for digitalized trade processes.

New digital standards, legal reforms and public–private partnerships are accelerating this shift. One example is the “Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records” (MLETR), which France adopted into national law in 2025. In practice, this means companies and banks can now operate on a legally recognized digital basis. However, legal validity does not automatically translate into operational readiness. Individual economies must now translate these legal frameworks into real-world processes.

Legislative models like the MLETR promote legal recognition of electronic, transferable records and lay an essential foundation for paperless trade. The challenge ahead lies in moving from legal frameworks to practical implementation.

Real-time data, automated processes and faster, more cost efficient digital document flows will soon become unavoidable in treasury operations. Securing international supply chains remains a top priority: geopolitical risks, sanctions and trade restrictions continue to increase exposure to payment and delivery failures. Companies therefore rely on robust instruments such as letters of credit, guarantees or documentary collections. Yet processing these instruments at scale requires standardized, digital and efficient workflows.

In addition, international trade finance still depends heavily on extensive paper-based documentation and complex reconciliation processes. The result is a persistent risk of processing errors, delays and system breaks. Trends such as digital letters of credit, eBLs (electronic bills of lading) and blockchain-based platforms show that modern trade finance processes are increasingly geared toward automation, transparency and real-time capability. Treasury expertise plays a particularly important role in this environment, as existing processes are often complex, time‑consuming and insufficiently digitalized. At the same time, there is still widespread uncertainty about the stability and long-term viability of emerging trade finance technologies.

Integrating trade-finance solutions into existing treasury management systems is known to be technically demanding and requires standardized API interfaces. Especially during implementation, many data points must be maintained manually when no digital integration is available. This leads to outdated information and potentially flawed decision-making. Finally, the shortage of skilled professionals in trade finance further intensifies the situation: specialized knowledge of documentary business, international regulations and complex financing structures is scarce. Digital tools, automated validation mechanisms and efficient end‑to‑end processes therefore become essential levers to ease capacity constraints and reduce risk.

A key focus of the current KPMG whitepaper is how digital trade can create competitive advantages. Cutting transaction times in half, doubling trade volumes and achieving significant cost savings by eliminating manual data entry, system breaks, rework, reconciliation cycles and the associated higher personnel costs all demonstrate the extensive benefits of paperless trade.

From a treasury perspective, it is worth taking a closer look at the management of guarantee and surety portfolios. If guarantees and sureties are not properly tracked and written off, the company ends up carrying unnecessary fee burdens and tying up credit lines. With the shift to paperless trade, timely derecognition of guarantees helps lower fees, indirectly reduces financing costs by freeing up credit lines and lowers so‑called fee leakage caused by incorrect or unverified charges. 

Further levers for corporate treasury include hedging, liquidity planning and reducing FX risks. For liquidity planning, hedging and risk management, treasury teams need real‑time information from trade finance transactions. Without integrating trade finance functionality into existing treasury systems, companies must continue to maintain data manually and decision‑making inevitably relies on outdated data. These obsolete data points can lead to over‑ or under‑hedging and incorrect liquidity decisions, which in turn can result in real financial losses.

According to the ICC, digitalizing the global trading system could increase traded volume in G7 economies by 43% by 2026 (see KPMG AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft 2026: Creating competitive advantages through paperless trade, p. 15). Cost savings are an additional benefit, as trade‑related costs currently represent about 3% of total trade value (with a projected reduction to 2.3% in 2026). Cross‑border, this would translate into potential savings of more than USD 200 billion.

International real-life examples highlight the potential of trade digitalization:

• Reduction in data requirements by a factor of eight at an engineering company
• 7 days less time needed to provide liquidity for a trade finance provider
• Minimization of vessel idle time to under one minute in a project by an oil company

These and other case studies are explained in detail in the white paper.

For treasury, paperless trade is not merely an operational topic but a direct lever for liquidity management, fee costs and risk management. In practical terms this means that companies should digitalize end-to-end process flows in trade finance and either implement dedicated guarantee management systems or integrate them via APIs into treasury systems, so that data for guarantees, fees, credit utilization and currency amounts can be updated automatically. In addition, immutable process logs increase transparency and significantly reduce audit efforts. 

To return once more to the previously mentioned recommendations and their practical relevance, we focus on a current example from a DAX company. As part of its process digitalization efforts, the company reports processing times that have been cut in half and error rates that have dropped sharply (see KPMG AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft (2026): Creating competitive advantages through paperless trade, p. 28). These are exactly the effects that treasury can translate directly into Opex improvements, better forecast quality and enhanced risk management.

The key question is no longer whether companies will digitalize but how quickly they can move from isolated digital steps to fully integrated end-to-end processes within their existing systems. The organizations that advance this shift the fastest benefit immediately: fewer manual interventions, shorter processing times, better data quality and a measurably more robust risk profile all create competitive advantages. The result is a treasury function that no longer chases documents but steers with current data – faster, more transparently and with far greater confidence.

Learn more about these topics and make use of the practical recommendations in the full white paper Creating competitive advantages through paperless trade – The huge potential of going digital (KPMG, 2026).