As international trade moves on to the web, business-to-business B2B portals and their members are looking for ways to keep the whole transaction process online inevitably this requires a streamlining of existing processes and elimination of paper.
Trade finance products and the commercial documents of trade, which have in many cases remained unchanged for over 100 years and rely heavily on processing paper documents, are being examined closely.
But at the same time, electronic trading communities do not want to throw the baby out with the bath water. For trade to happen successfully, buyer and seller must be able to identify each other accurately, they must agree a contract, the seller must be...