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. 

They are relatively easy to fake. Frequently get lost. And can add huge amounts of time to any journey. Yet paper documents still rule in the $25 trillion global cargo trade with four billion of them in circulation at any one time.

It is a system that has barely changed since the nineteenth century. But that dependence on bits of paper being flown from one party to another has become a vulnerability for companies which move and finance the world’s resources around the globe.