Auckland, NZ. TradeWindow, the NZ-headquartered digital platform committed to accelerating global trade, has significantly boosted digital trade networks for Australasian exporters, after being admitted to membership of the leading alliance for facilitating open cross-border digital trade.

The company will commence a new role with the influential Pan-Asian E-Commerce Alliance (PAA), effective immediately, taking its place alongside 13 other quasi-national representative organisations to create a powerful network of networks; spanning China, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong SAR, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, India and Sweden.

Chief Executive of TradeWindow, AJ Smith, said this is an exciting development for enabling digital trade between New Zealand, Australia and Asia and will help give effect to the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA) which New Zealand, Singapore and Chile signed three weeks ago.

“We’re excited to join PAA at a time when effective and efficient digital trade channels between Australasia and Asia and are more important than ever. We see this as global recognition for TradeWindow’s expertise in secure digital trade processes as well as the calibre of our active and growing user community which includes over 400 export customers from 30 trade sectors,” says Mr Smith.

“TradeWindow will share our experience using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and will tap the knowledge and extensive market reach of PAA’s other members to really accelerate two-way trade.”

“For us, membership is a big step towards creating a network of networks to enable seamless digital global trade and will lend weight to the case for governments in the region, including Australia and New Zealand to take the next steps to embrace digital protocols to enable import and export trade.”

“End-to-end digital trade will remove friction from trade processes to expedite an export led recovery from COVID-19,” says Mr Smith.

The PAA is the first regional alliance serving over 350,000 businesses in the trade and logistics community. It has eleven members and three associate members including TradeWindow who all specialise in facilitating paperless trade.

KK Tse, PAA Chair, said the addition of TradeWindow saw the alliance extend its geographic coverage to Oceania for the first time.

“’We are delighted to welcome TradeWindow to join PAA following our recent new associate members from India and Sweden. PAA was focusing on Asia before and now expanding to other parts of the world, given trade is a global industry and at this juncture with so many trade tensions around the world, we hope to provide positive energy and initiatives to help address many industry issues. TradeWindow will strengthen our connectivity in the Oceania and this will certainly facilitate our interaction among members with New Zealand and Australia going forward,’ says Mr Tse.

Joining this alliance of digitally connected businesses, is a logical step for TradeWindow.

TradeWindow’s platform provides a ‘single source of truth’ for exporters and parties along all stages of the supply chain, and the blockchain technology behind the platform provides users with a ‘trail of trust’.

It’s modular applications for managing export operations include export documentation, compliance, risk management, and traceability. A trade finance marketplace and payment integration applications are planned to be launched soon.

Using TradeWindow’s product ‘Cube’, exporters can instantly share trusted data with permissioned supply chain participants including freight forwarders, ports, government agencies etc.

“We will continue to be a champion for change to the way trade has ‘always been done’, so exporters can focus on their customers and generate more value across the entire trade process,” says Mr Smith