Articles under "#Blockchain" category

Issue: WCO News 96 October 2021

Blockchain, artificial intelligence and big data: how Korea Customs Service leverages technology to supervise e-commerce

Korea Customs Service (KCS) has introduced a range of measures since early 2010 to respond to a growing number of imports and exports generated by online sales and purchases by both businesses and individuals, given the strong upward trend in cross-border e-commerce.

KCS previously describ...

Strengthening data capture through blockchain

At the moment, assessing risk presents some constraints, given the low quality of data available. One way to strengthen the risk management system would be to obtain the data, including the va...

Issue: WCO News 88

Korea pilots blockchain technology as it prepares for the future

Since the Fourth Industrial Revolution was mentioned in 2016 at the World Economic Forum, the impact of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the blockchain and “big data” have become issues discussed at length worldwide. In Korea, in preparing for the future, the governm...

2018: Project design

The KCS’s second step was to review areas where the use of blockchain solutions would make sense. The import/export clearance process was identified as a good start, given that it would benefit ...

Issue: WCO News 98 – Issue 2 / 2022

Protecting importers’ information while improving Customs controls

Customs administrations and trade operators both want to reduce the complexity of compiling and exchanging data. However, there can be tension between the Customs administration’s need to access data and the company’s need to protect confidential informatio...

SFML: developing analytical algorithms without exchanging data

As an example, let us consider the case of secure federated machine learning (SFML),[1] a machine-learning technique that...

Vietnam Customs use case

In Vietnam, material used for export production can be imported duty-free. Material import and consumption are controlled by the General Departmen...

Issue: WCO News 94 February 2021

TradeTrust: accelerating the digitalization of international trade

Singapore is spearheading the implementation of TradeTrust, which is a framework comprised of a set of globally accepted standards to facilitate the digitalization of documents used in international trade and logistics and their interoperability, and also a set of ...

For example, the Bill of Lading (BL)[1] is still provided in hardcopy in many countries, creating inefficiencies. It requires time and money to courier the BL document to destination ports of discharge, plus there are risks of the BL getting lost in transit, w...

Issue: WCO News 94 February 2021

Improving data sharing with blockchain

Towards a digital transformation

COVID-19 has put immense pressure on traders and supply-chain managers and has highlighted the need for more traceability and visibility in trade transactions, and for more interoperability in IT systems,...

How it works

As soon as a company AEO certification is approved, a Customs officer in country A uploads information on that company to CADENA. The applicati...

Issue: WCO News 99- Issue 3 / 2022

Egypt adopts innovative trade document exchange system

In 2019, the Arab Republic of Egypt decided to move away from a slow and burdensome paper-based way of processing cross-border transactions to one based on automation and digitization. As part of this transformation, the country required economic operators and government entities to begin exchang...

NAFEZA was built by the Egyptian company MTS, majority-owned by the Egyptian Finance Ministry and other government entities, with CargoX providing the blockchain document transfer services. Both took into account existing norms and practices for developing single windows, as laid out in the WCO S...

Issue: WCO News 97 – Issue 1 / 2022

Blockchain document transfer: understanding the technology and its uses

According to research, a single container shipment can generate up to 200 communications, and the administrative cost of processing the accompanying documentation is estimated to be 15‑20% of the overall cost of transporting the goods. It is therefore essential to find easier, more efficient w...

Existing model

Blockchain can help digitize the shipping industry, where ownership, traceability and security are paramount. A current processing model used by a Customs administration to receive and process advance cargo information (ACI...

Issue: WCO News 87

Blockchain: unveiling its potential for Customs and trade

This section of the magazine gathers several articles on the “Blockchain,” a term which refers to a type of data structure that identifies and tracks transactions digitally and shares this information across a distributed network of computers. Blockchain is one type of distributed ledger: dis...

In terms of governance, Blockchain technology is decentralized. There is, however, an operator function that sets the rules for everyone in the network, along with regulators and government agencies. If the network detects that something “untoward” may be going on, the associated individual p...

Issue: WCO News 91 February 2020

Dubai Customs introduces blockchain-based platform to facilitate cross-border e-commerce

Dubai, the second largest emirate of the UAE, stands among the fastest growing e-commerce markets in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), bearing the fruits of adopting incentivizing policies and “smart government” initiatives. Recently, the Government of Dubai rolled out the emirate’s ...

E-commerce challenges

With a 25% yearly growth rate, the MENA region is the world’s fastest growing e-commerce market. Dubai consumers and businesses are major contributors to this growth, which is expected to continue ...

Issue: WCO News 87

Blockchain: mapping new trade routes to trust

The border is a national asset. To boost national competitiveness, facilitating legitimate cross-border trade must be high on every government’s agenda. The World Trade Organization (WTO) estimates that ratification of the Trade Facilitation Agreement could boost global trade by up to 1 trillio...

Blockchain: a new perspective for cross-border trade

Two years ago, blockchain was still largely a buzzword. Today, it’s high on the agenda of most leading Customs and trade organizations. Rather than asking whether blo...

Issue: WCO News 87

CADENA, a blockchain enabled solution for the implementation of Mutual Recognition Arrangements/Agreements

The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) has been supporting the development of a blockchain solution to enable automated, secure and efficient information sharing on Authorized Economic Operators (AEOs) among the Customs administrations of Mexico, Peru and C...

To inform each other, designated Customs officers in each administration send, by email, an excel file containing the data elements that the countries agreed to exchange on their respective AEOs. Customs administrations engaged in an MRA also determine the period during which data should be excha...

Issue: WCO News 87

TradeLens uses blockchain to help Customs authorities facilitate trade and increase compliance

“Did you pack this bag yourself?” It’s a question many of us are used to being asked when checking in at an airport. For a shipping container, the situation is more complex. Most organizations never communicate directly with the party that stuffed...

A global data pipeline

TradeLens realizes the ‘data pipeline’ concept developed by respected career Customs officers, Frank Heijmann and David Hesketh, and others, which was explored in various European Union (EU) research pro...

Issue: WCO News 87

Going beyond the national Single Window

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with its Hong Kong counterpart in November 2017 to jointly develop a cross-border distributed ledger technology (DLT) based infrastructure that will link up digital tr...

“If it ain’t broke, why fix it?”

TradeNet is almost 30 years old. Launched in 1989, when the Internet was still the domain of academics and researchers, it was well ahead of its time and its successful implementatio...

Issue: WCO News 101 – Issue 2 / 2023

Open Customs Blockchain: The missing piece to unlocking the broad application of distributed ledger technology for Customs?

Digitalization has simplified Customs clearance in many areas, especially in the declaration of imports and exports. However, various data discontinuities and queries unnecessarily delay cross-border process flows. A group of major logistics companies, software pro...

The added value of blockchain usage lies in the tamper-proof provision of the relevant data at an early stage in the process and in feeding information on Customs clearance back into the logistics process to make it available to the other players up and downstream of the supply chain. In this way...