This is us:
FIT Alliance.
One mission.
The FIT Alliance (“Future of International Trade”), was formed in February 2022 with five founding members: BIMCO, DCSA, FIATA, ICC and Swift. The key objectives of the FIT Alliance are to raise awareness and accelerate adoption of a standards-based electronic bill of lading (eBL) across all sectors of the shipping industry: a universal eBL.
The Alliance works together to generate awareness about the benefits of going digital and the importance of common and interoperable data standards and common legislative conditions across international jurisdictions and platforms.
The aim is to facilitate acceptance and adoption of eBLs by shippers, consignees, carriers, regulators, banks and insurers and to unify communication between these organisations and all other stakeholders involved in an international trade transaction.
FIT Alliance founding members
The digitalisation of documentation for container shipments will add value for international suppliers who rely on shipping across sectors,” “Aligning these standards with the electronic bill of lading standard for the dry and liquid bulk sectors, which we are developing with assistance from DCSA, will help accelerate the digitalisation of trade globally.
David Loosley
Secretary General and CEO of BIMCO
Through the FIT Alliance, we are collaborating with key industry players to create and accelerate the adoption of digital standards for bills of lading that will make international shipping dramatically more simple, secure and seamless. This will drive a sea change in companies’ productivity and business models, the two critical ingredients to help businesses build back better, and unleash benefits at an ecosystem level which have never before been achieved.
John W.H. Denton AO
ICC Secretary General
The FIT Alliance is one exciting result of our ongoing effort to drive that collaboration. Container ships carry 90% of the world’s goods. As such, an incredibly diverse set of stakeholders touches the B/L transaction—from government regulators, to insurers, to shippers from every industry. To achieve widespread use of eBL, they must all be on board with adopting digital B/L standards. The agreement between DCSA and these diverse industry associations is an exciting milestone in our journey towards standardising all container shipping documentation through our eDocumentation initiative.
Thomas Bagge
DCSA CEO
Swift is the way the world moves value, connecting 11,500 institutions in more than 200 countries and facilitating over $2 trillion in global trade every year. We have significantly accelerated cross-border flows in recent years and are innovating at scale to make them instant. To that end, we are delighted to be part of this cross-industry collaboration to tackle friction through standardisation and enable interoperability across the ecosystem to allow rich data to flow freely between multiple platforms.
Thierry Chilosi
Chief Strategy Officer at Swift
Interoperability between all actors of the trade and transport industry is the key foundation to enable smooth data exchange and to streamline the end-to-end shipping process for our members,” “FIATA, as the owner of the only negotiable multimodal transport document, endorsed by UNCTAD and ICC, is convinced that an industry-wide effort to establish open-source, interoperable, technology-agnostic standards is essential to make digitalization of international trade a reality.