On 12 February 2025, the Trade Finance Registry (“TFR“) and the Singapore Trade Data Exchange (“SGTraDex“) jointly announced the launch of their collaboration on the Bill of Lading (“BL“) Genuineness Check. This automated, industry-wide solution builds on TFR’s Duplicate Financing Check launched in 2023, assisting banks in Singapore to verify the authenticity of BLs in real time.
BLs are key in facilitating the maritime shipment of goods and are typically used as supporting documents to apply for trade financing. Currently, BLs are verified through a manual process that involves banks calling or sending emails to conduct such verifications.
How it Works
The BL Genuineness Check is a key component of SGTraDex’s Trade Finance Physical to Digital Twinning use case, which aims to digitalise data exchanges between banks, corporates, and logistics players, which are SGTraDex users. According to TFR and SGTraDex, the BL Genuineness Check is powered by a secure data connection between TFR, SGTraDex, carrier data aggregators and ocean carriers. This allows banks to retrieve data points from carriers quickly and automatically.
According to TFR and SGTraDex, the BL Genuineness Check process involves banks submitting trade document data points to TFR for duplicate financing checks and BL verification from carrier data aggregators and ocean carriers who are SGTraDex users. To verify the genuineness of a BL issued by an ocean carrier which is a SGTraDex user, SGTraDex – acting as the primary data conduit via an API connection with TFR – routes a request for information to carrier data aggregators, who can then retrieve the requested information from carriers and transmit the same back to the requesting bank, via TFR, for the bank to complete the verification check.
Portcast and Ocean Network Express (ONE) are the inaugural carrier data aggregator and ocean carrier, respectively, to participate in data connection to facilitate the BL Genuineness Check. TFR aims to have 70% of TFR participant banks use the BL Genuineness Check as one of several methods to verify BLs. Moving forward, SGTraDex plans to collaborate with more carriers and data aggregators to further enhance the value proposition of this solution.
Disclaimer
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