by PUBLIC

TradeTech Hub

Trade digitalisation is now a matter of strategic importance for governments worldwide. Trade systems - the infrastructure that moves goods, documents, data, and finance across borders - are shifting from fragmented, paper-heavy processes into connected digital networks. That shift is accelerating, and the countries and companies that understand it will have a real advantage.

PUBLIC’s TradeTech Hub is where we make sense of that transition. It’s home to the International State of TradeTech - our analysis of how digital trade is evolving globally, where the opportunities are, and what it actually takes to move from policy ambition to operational reality. It also hosts the UK TradeTech Index: a live, searchable map of over 290 UK companies building the next generation of trade infrastructure.

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Application Guidance

TradeTech is the application of digital technology to international trade - customs, logistics, documentation, finance, supply chains, and border security. It sits at the intersection of innovation and economic infrastructure, and it’s increasingly a policy priority, not just a commercial one. Governments are legislating for digital trade readiness. Trade agreements are embedding digital standards. Getting this right is becoming a matter of national competitiveness.

What is TradeTech?

Six domains define the landscape

Customs
& Borders

Automated declarations, Single Window systems, AI-driven risk assessment, and interoperable border infrastructure replacing fragmented manual processes.

Logisitics
& Operations

Intelligent port environments, real-time freight visibility, predictive analytics, and automation transforming shipping, warehousing, and multimodal transport.

Paperless
Trade

Electronic trade documents, digital signatures, and MLETR-compatible legal frameworks eliminating the paper workflows that have slowed global commerce for decades.

Security
& Risk

Sanctions screening, export control automation, fraud detection, and supply chain assurance as trade systems increasingly intersect with national security.

Supply
Chain

End-to-end visibility, provenance verification, and predictive intelligence giving governments and industry genuine sight of strategic supply chain vulnerabilities.

Trade
Finance

Digital guarantees, electronic negotiable instruments, and embedded finance systems accelerating liquidity and reducing barriers to trade for SMEs and exporters.

Explore the International State of TradeTech 
Regional Analysis

Trade digitalisation is no longer a future ambition - it’s happening now, at different speeds and with different priorities across every major trading region. Below is our read of where things stand across 5 key regions.

For each region, we outline: what’s driving progress, what’s creating opportunity, and what it means for the UK.

North America

Europe

Middle East

Asia-Pacific

Africa

North America

North America's TradeTech transition is being shaped by two forces running in parallel: the drive toward operational integration, and a sharpening focus on strategic trade security.

For example, the United States is home to one of the most advanced digital customs environments in the world. The Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) consolidates data flows across dozens of federal agencies into a single customs window - a level of integration most trading nations are still working toward. USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada Agreement) has extended common digital trade standards across the region, providing a foundation for more integrated cross-border data flows between the US, Canada, and Mexico.

However, North America’s TradeTech story isn’t just about efficiency. Tightening oversight of semiconductors, dual-use goods, and advanced manufacturing is driving demand for more sophisticated export control, sanctions screening, and supply chain intelligence tools. The US Bureau of Industry and Security has significantly expanded its Entity List in recent years, requiring companies to integrate real-time compliance checks into their trade workflows as a matter of course. TradeTech here is increasingly as much about strategic compliance as operational efficiency.

‍For the UK, the transatlantic corridor - particularly across pharmaceuticals, advanced manufacturing, and financial services - reinforces the strategic importance of interoperable customs and logistics systems on both sides of the Atlantic. Ongoing discussions around a broader UK-US trade framework make this a corridor worth watching closely.

Key Market: USA

Home to one of the most advanced digital customs environments globally (ACE), and an increasingly influential driver of strategic trade governance standards as geopolitical competition reshapes trade policy.

Overview
Key Strengths
Key Challenges
Adoption Reality

Overview

We provide end-to-end support across the procurement process, from sourcing and supply chain management to running effective tendering approaches to spend data analysis. Our expertise has empowered numerous UK authorities to unlock the full potential of their procurement teams.

Finance & FinTech

Working at the intersection of procurement and digital, we help authorities transform their procurement systems to leverage new technologies, embed organisational values, design world-class services and promote end-to-end innovation throughout the supply chain.

monitoring and eval

Monitoring & Evaluation

We partner with authorities to assess the impact and benefits of their projects, adhering to HMT best practices and employing modern data-driven analysis and evaluation methods.

sustainability

Sustainability & Social Value

We assist authorities in promoting sustainability and social value throughout their procurement and spending processes, while also measuring tangible impacts. Our toolkit includes innovative tools, frameworks, and data collection processes that allow authorities to deliver meaningful social and environmental benefits.

Europe

Overview
Key Strengths
Key Challenges
Adoption Reality

Overview

We provide end-to-end support across the procurement process, from sourcing and supply chain management to running effective tendering approaches to spend data analysis. Our expertise has empowered numerous UK authorities to unlock the full potential of their procurement teams.

Finance & FinTech

Working at the intersection of procurement and digital, we help authorities transform their procurement systems to leverage new technologies, embed organisational values, design world-class services and promote end-to-end innovation throughout the supply chain.

monitoring and eval

Monitoring & Evaluation

We partner with authorities to assess the impact and benefits of their projects, adhering to HMT best practices and employing modern data-driven analysis and evaluation methods.

sustainability

Sustainability & Social Value

We assist authorities in promoting sustainability and social value throughout their procurement and spending processes, while also measuring tangible impacts. Our toolkit includes innovative tools, frameworks, and data collection processes that allow authorities to deliver meaningful social and environmental benefits.

Europe is taking a different approach to trade digitalisation from most other regions: it’s making it mandatory. For example, the EU’s eFTI regulation requires member states to accept digital freight information across all trade systems by 2027, effectively turning interoperable digital logistics from a competitive advantage into a baseline requirement for market participation.

Rather than building centralised continental databases, Europe is pursuing interoperability: national systems, ports, logistics operators, and private platforms exchanging structured data while maintaining sovereign governance. Germany’s national implementation of eFTI is already generating real demand for interoperability layers and digital identity infrastructure - the kind of solutions many UK TradeTech companies are well-placed to provide.

For UK firms, this matters regardless of Brexit. High-volume UK-EU flows across automotive, pharmaceuticals, and industrial goods mean that businesses unable to integrate with emerging eFTI and customs interoperability standards will face growing friction. In many respects, Europe is becoming the global proving ground for operational digital trade architecture at scale.

Key Market: 
Germany

Home to one of the most advanced digital customs environmentsEurope’s primary industrial and logistics hub, playing a leading role in implementing eFTI and setting the technical standards that will define European digital trade infrastructure in practice. globally (ACE), and an increasingly influential driver of strategic trade governance standards as geopolitical competition reshapes trade policy.

Middle East

Overview
Key Strengths
Key Challenges
Adoption Reality

Overview

We provide end-to-end support across the procurement process, from sourcing and supply chain management to running effective tendering approaches to spend data analysis. Our expertise has empowered numerous UK authorities to unlock the full potential of their procurement teams.

Finance & FinTech

Working at the intersection of procurement and digital, we help authorities transform their procurement systems to leverage new technologies, embed organisational values, design world-class services and promote end-to-end innovation throughout the supply chain.

monitoring and eval

Monitoring & Evaluation

We partner with authorities to assess the impact and benefits of their projects, adhering to HMT best practices and employing modern data-driven analysis and evaluation methods.

sustainability

Sustainability & Social Value

We assist authorities in promoting sustainability and social value throughout their procurement and spending processes, while also measuring tangible impacts. Our toolkit includes innovative tools, frameworks, and data collection processes that allow authorities to deliver meaningful social and environmental benefits.

The Gulf states handle enormous flows of high-value commodities - oil and gas above all - where even marginal improvements in processing speed and documentation accuracy translate into significant economic gain. That commercial imperative, combined with ambitious economic diversification programmes, is driving some of the most rapid regulatory reform in TradeTech anywhere in the world.

Trade finance is where the transformation is most visible. Reforms in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi - covering electronic signatures, adoption of MLETR, and digital negotiable instruments - are modernising the legal architecture required for fully digital trade finance to function. The Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) has enacted legislation recognising electronic transferable records, allowing bills of lading and other key instruments to move across supply chains without physical transfer - faster transactions, lower administrative cost, and less friction for everyone involved.

The UAE in particular is positioning itself as the digital switchboard for South-South trade - a strategic node linking Asia, Africa, and Europe through advanced logistics infrastructure and open data flow policies. For UK firms across digital trade finance, customs modernisation, and maritime systems, ongoing UK-GCC negotiations represent a significant commercial opportunity.

Key Market: 
UAE

Rapidly becoming the digital gateway for South-South trade, combining advanced logistics infrastructure, progressive regulatory reform, and strategic geographic positioning.

Asia-Pacfici (APAC)

Overview
Key Strengths
Key Challenges
Adoption Reality

Overview

We provide end-to-end support across the procurement process, from sourcing and supply chain management to running effective tendering approaches to spend data analysis. Our expertise has empowered numerous UK authorities to unlock the full potential of their procurement teams.

Finance & FinTech

Working at the intersection of procurement and digital, we help authorities transform their procurement systems to leverage new technologies, embed organisational values, design world-class services and promote end-to-end innovation throughout the supply chain.

monitoring and eval

Monitoring & Evaluation

We partner with authorities to assess the impact and benefits of their projects, adhering to HMT best practices and employing modern data-driven analysis and evaluation methods.

sustainability

Sustainability & Social Value

We assist authorities in promoting sustainability and social value throughout their procurement and spending processes, while also measuring tangible impacts. Our toolkit includes innovative tools, frameworks, and data collection processes that allow authorities to deliver meaningful social and environmental benefits.

For UK TradeTech firms, Asia-Pacific (APAC) represents a huge concentration of demand. As the world's largest manufacturing and sourcing hub, the region is driving substantial investment into interoperable trade systems, underpinned by a growing network of Digital Economy Agreements (DEAs) establishing common standards around e-invoicing, digital identity, trusted data exchange, and paperless trade.

The ASEAN region is home to some of the world's most advanced digital trade frameworks, with Singapore's DEA with Australia demonstrating what paperless, near-instantaneous clearance can look like in practice - enabling mutual recognition of digital trade documents and real-time customs data sharing for qualifying goods. Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam are each at different stages of developing national digital trade legislation aligned with UNCITRAL MLETR standards, and that momentum is reshaping how the broader region approaches cross-border trade infrastructure.

The corridor dynamics across ASEAN mirror many of the themes we identified in the UK-Australia context: policy alignment providing a strong foundation, but operational adoption remaining uneven. Documentation-intensive sectors - electronics, automotive components, processed goods - continue to face friction from fragmented systems and inconsistent data standards, even where bilateral agreements exist. The gap between legal enablement and system-wide implementation remains the central challenge.Rather than a single dominant centre, trade across the region is increasingly distributing across interconnected nodes linked through interoperable infrastructure - creating both complexity and opportunity, particularly for UK firms whose platforms are designed for cross-border data flows across multiple regulatory environments simultaneously.

PUBLIC's work across ASEAN, through the FCDO's Open Trade Pillar and the ASEAN Economic Integration Programme, sits directly within this transition. Our ASEAN TradeTech Lookbook and corridor analysis reports map the demand landscape in detail, including sector-level friction points, regulatory readiness assessments, and profiles of live TradeTech deployments across the region.

Key Market: 
Singapore

The world’s leading reference model for interoperable digital trade, actively shaping international frameworks through its DEA programme and paperless trade standards.

Africa

Overview
Key Strengths
Key Challenges
Adoption Reality

Overview

We provide end-to-end support across the procurement process, from sourcing and supply chain management to running effective tendering approaches to spend data analysis. Our expertise has empowered numerous UK authorities to unlock the full potential of their procurement teams.

Finance & FinTech

Working at the intersection of procurement and digital, we help authorities transform their procurement systems to leverage new technologies, embed organisational values, design world-class services and promote end-to-end innovation throughout the supply chain.

monitoring and eval

Monitoring & Evaluation

We partner with authorities to assess the impact and benefits of their projects, adhering to HMT best practices and employing modern data-driven analysis and evaluation methods.

sustainability

Sustainability & Social Value

We assist authorities in promoting sustainability and social value throughout their procurement and spending processes, while also measuring tangible impacts. Our toolkit includes innovative tools, frameworks, and data collection processes that allow authorities to deliver meaningful social and environmental benefits.

Africa’s TradeTech moment is arriving alongside the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) - the largest free trade area in the world by number of participating countries. It's worth understanding the shape of African trade to understand the opportunity. The majority of trade is intra-continental - goods moving between neighbouring countries, often through informal or semi-formal channels with fragmented documentation and customs infrastructure. A smaller set of commodity-rich economies, particularly in oil, minerals, and agricultural products, drive significant outward flows to international markets.

These are meaningfully different TradeTech problems: intra-continental trade calls for lightweight, accessible digital tools that can function in lower-capacity environments, while inter-continental corridors require interoperability with the structured systems used by global trading partners.

The opportunity is significant precisely because much of the continent’s trade infrastructure is still being established. There’s genuine scope to adopt interoperable digital systems from the ground up rather than retrofit legacy architecture - and some countries are already moving. Rwanda has emerged as a first-mover, using early digital trade adoption programmes to position itself as a continental pilot market. Over time, Africa’s digital trade development will likely play a defining role in shaping South-South corridors connecting Africa, the Gulf, and Asia.

Key Market: 
Rwanda

Africa’s most forward-looking digital trade environment, establishing the blueprint for scalable TradeTech adoption across the continent ahead of AfCFTA implementation.

The UK TradeTech Index  
An searchable, interactive map of the UK TradeTech sector

In 2023, PUBLIC was commissioned by the FCDO to map the UK TradeTech ecosystem. What we found was a substantial and largely unmapped body of innovation: over 290 UK companies building digital infrastructure across every domain of international trade.


‍The UK TradeTech Index is that map - searchable, filterable, and open for anyone to access.

Research & Insights
Dive deeper into the TradeTech ecosystem