The UK’s ICC and its Centre for Digital Trade & Innovation (C4DTI) announced several initiatives to prepare UK trade for the soon-to-be-passed Electronic Trade Documents Bill. The Bill, now in Parliament, removes the hundreds of years old requirement for commercial trade documents to be handled on paper.

The ICC firmly believes that “switching from paper to digital documents will provide more transparency to help businesses, consumers, and governments make more informed choices on the products and suppliers they choose while making international trade faster, simpler and cheaper for all involved.” The ICC also expects to see the Bill lead to £225 billion in efficiency savings, £25 billion in SME trade growth and £1 billion new trade finance.

The Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) is an essential component to realising the opportunity created by the Bill.

“The need to accurately identify, authenticate and trust organisations is essential if we are to realise the full potential of the digital economy. The LEI is the only publicly accessible global identifier that represents current organisation identity information, connects counterparties for trading, simplifies client onboarding, and enables trusted business relationships. Over 2m organisations already have LEIs, but this is the tip of the iceberg of the greater global economy.”
Simon Wood, Ubisecure CEO

Ubisecure, along with other ICC partners including Deloitte and Plexal, is honoured to be involved in the rollout of initiatives. Through our RapidLEI service, we are working closely with the ICC’s C4DTI, the GLEIF (Global LEI Foundation) and the Institute of Export and International Trade to educate and promote the use adoption of LEIs.

As well as a number of educational programmes, UK businesses can obtain special reduced pricing of just £35 per LEI at rapidlei.com/c4dti/. RapidLEI is based in the UK with a local client service team ready to help UK businesses around the clock.

Read the full ICC & C4DTI Press Release