eBL Adoption: 12.8% — But 87% of Trade Is Still Paper

Apr 22, 2026

But one critical element still moves slowly:

The document that controls everything.

We followed a recent webinar by Enigio, featuring insights from Merisa Lee Gimpel (Digital Trade Works) and Manish Mehta (Maersk).

💡The conclusion was clear:

This is no longer a technology problem. It is a coordination problem.

Global eBL adoption reached 12.8% in 2025 (DCSA) — up from ~5% in 2024
This is the inflection point where digital adoption starts accelerating
Trade operates on 3 flows: goods, documents, money
Money flow depends entirely on document flow
Paper still drives billions in delays, fraud risk, and admin costs
Only ~11 countries currently enable eBL under MLETR-type laws
Manish Mehta: “eBL requires industry-wide collaboration — no single player can solve it”
Once companies adopt eBL, they don’t go back to paper
Document cycles can shrink from ~1 week to minutes in real cases
Structured data — not PDFs — is the real unlock for automation and trade finance

The industry has already done the hard part:

Yet adoption is still below 15%.

Why?

Because trade is not digitized by one company.

It requires banks, carriers, shippers, and regulators to move together — at the same time.

That is the real challenge.

Digital trade will not be decided by who has the best technology.

It will be decided by:

👉 who aligns stakeholders fastest
👉 who moves from pilots to execution first

Because in global trade:

The bottleneck is no longer cargo.

It is trust — and how fast it can move between institutions.

Maritime Analytica