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On Monday, 15 December, the United Nations General Assembly officially adopted the UN Convention on Negotiable Cargo Documents (NCD).
The treaty creates a new type of cargo document similar to the maritime bill of lading for goods travelling by road, air, and rail, allowing them to exist in electronic form and change owners while in transit. This is the first time that legally binding digital trade documents, which can be applied at any stage in a supply chain, have been introduced.
As a result, a shipment can now be covered by one digital document throughout its journey, regardless of mode of transport. This will simplify complex trade transactions – especially those involving long journeys or last-minute route changes – and reduce risk by providing legal certainty on who owns the cargo at every point in the journey.
As they stand, a shipment can involve up to 30 different documents and 240 copies, as each party in a transaction needs confirmation of the arrival of goods; further complicated when a transaction receives trade financing.
Having a single digital document would reduce delays and fraud risk, likely making it far easier for exporters to receive supply chain finance.
“The NCD has great potential to lower barriers to trade further – by allowing the use of a single cargo document regardless of the mode of transport, and then allowing that document to be negotiable, digital, and transferable,” said Pamela Mar, Managing Director of the International Chamber of Commerce’s (ICC) Digital Standards Initiative (DSI).
“Importantly, the NCD is based on the same principles and interoperability approach as MLETR, and thus endorsement and transfer can be done with very much the same approach as is the case for EBL.”
The Convention also allows goods to be bought, sold, or used as collateral while in transit, bringing goods travelling by air, road, or rail on a closer standing with those on maritime routes. This will make it easier for exporters to respond to unpredictable price or logistical shocks by, for example, rerouting goods bound for a country affected by a natural disaster or selling goods in transit that have recently risen in price.
The adoption of the Convention will be marked by a signing ceremony in the second half of 2026 in Ghana. However, its contents are not binding for any of its members. Like the Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR), countries must ratify the treaty to be bound by it.
The MLETR, adopted in 2017, was also hailed as a new dawn for trade digitisation, but has only been ratified by about a dozen countries, and only three of the world’s top ten exporters.
However, the Spokesperson for the Secretary General said that the UN was “extremely confident” that countries would ratify the Convention in good time.
“Business should now speak out to encourage their respective governments to sign the convention, so that it can come into full force very soon,” said Mar
