In the first of a new weekly series of interviews with members of the Smart Maritime Council, Andre Simha shares his perspectives on the state of maritime technology and his hopes for the future of the sector as he draws the curtain on a 40-year career with shipping giant MSC.

After some 40 years leading digital transformation and innovation initiatives for one of the world’s largest shipping companies, Andre Simha completed his tenure at MSC at the end of March of this year, moving on from his position as Chief Digital & Information Officer.

Born and raised in Geneva in Switzerland, Simha’s horizons were broadened early, with a stint at boarding school in the UK between the ages of 11 and 14, as well as one year spent in the United States in 1979 studying cotton in Memphis, Tennessee, before beginning his MSC journey in 1986.

That journey began with his first major digital maritime project, involving the development of a software tool designed to file rates with the US Federal Maritime Commission (FMC). This project eventually laid the groundwork for the internal MSC DTX Standard, but its most lasting impact on Simha was the lesson it provided on human nature.

“This taught me that the realities of digitalising maritime are less about the technology itself and more about overcoming the industry’s natural resistance to change. I realised early on that while ‘geeks’ like me loved the tech, most people only care about how it simplifies their daily work,” he explains.

“Knowing what I know now, I would have pushed for industry-wide collaboration and standardisation much earlier. We spent many years developing internal solutions in silos, but the true potential of digitalisation only scales when the entire ecosystem moves together on a common foundation.”

A digital lingua franca

In Simha’s view, the fragmented nature of the maritime sector remains the biggest barrier to the widespread adoption of new technology. In an industry that is necessarily incredibly interconnected, the historical reliance on competing formats and isolated systems has hindered value creation.

“A digital solution only provides true value when it is broadly implemented across the entire value chain, from carriers and ports to banks and regulators. Without industry-wide standards adoption and interoperability, we are essentially building ‘digital islands’ that can’t talk to one another,” he says.

“Standards are the digital equivalent of the shipping container. Just as the physical container revolutionised trade by ensuring every ship, crane, and truck spoke the same physical language, a common digital language is the only way to move our industry out of the dark ages of fragmentation.”

Simha believes that a wide variety of maritime pain points could be partially or totally alleviated with an improved level of digital integration between stakeholders.

“A common language eliminates silos, allowing data to flow seamlessly across the entire ecosystem without manual ‘translation’. Standardised APIs turn this into a ‘plug-and-play’ scenario, drastically lowering the barrier to entry for smaller players and accelerating innovation for everyone,” he notes.

“Real-time visibility is becoming more and more critical. In maritime, we often suffer from “data lag. When systems don’t talk to each other, you only find out a container has been delayed hours or days after the fact.”

His commitment to eliminating inefficiency through collaborative standardisation led Simha to become one of the co-founders of the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) in 2019, a non-profit organisation created by major ocean carriers including MSC, Maersk, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd to create the digital blueprints the industry was missing.

“Through the DCSA, we launched initiatives that move us away from proprietary silos toward true integration,” he explains, citing the example of the 100% eBL pledge, a commitment alongside other major carriers to fully transition to electronic Bills of Lading (eBL) by 2030.

“This is not just about MSC, it’s a cross-industry commitment involving banks, insurers, and authorities to ensure a digital document is accepted everywhere. Interoperability standards have also allowed us to recently reach a milestone where eBLs can now move between different technology platforms. This solves the ‘locked-in’ problem where a shipper and a carrier had to use the exact same software to talk to each other.”

“We’ve also made significant advances in applying internet of things (IoT) technologies to make containers ‘smart’. By collaborating with tech partners like Traxens and Orbcomm we have integrated real-time tracking (position, temperature, door status) directly into our customers’ systems. Instead of checking a website, the data flows into their own ERPs. These projects prove that the most successful digital tools are those built with the industry, not just for one company.”

Pragmatism over hype

The historical reluctance to share data in maritime is a symptom of a mindset Simha views as outdated. He makes a sharp distinction between competitive data, such as pricing or ‘secret sauce’ strategies, and operational data like vessel schedules and container status.

“Protecting basic operational data does not provide an advantage, it just creates digital islands and massive inefficiency,” he says.

“I have often said we shouldn’t compete on the ‘plumbing’ of the industry. Sharing that data is like sharing a railway track gauge; it doesn’t stop competition, it just allows the trains to run. Our true competitive advantage lies in the quality of service we deliver, not in hiding the status of a box.”

The application of Artificial Intelligence has been touted in some circles as a solution to this lack of digital integration. But while he sees AI as a powerful tool for improving issues like vessel routing, fuel consumption, and documentation automation, Simha warns that it is not a cure-all for a fragmented industry – AI is a passenger, not the driver, and it remains only as good as the data standards it is fed.

“If you feed it ‘garbage’ data, you just get ‘garbage’ results faster. AI is at its best when it works invisibly in the background to make our processes smoother and our people more effective,” he adds.

For Simha, the truest measure of success for AI or any other new technology is not found in the dollar figures on a spreadsheet, but in the level of user adoption.

“At MSC we focused on time-to-value and scalability. Because we built mostly internally, the critical metrics were operational efficiencies and cost avoidance,” he said.

“The truest measure of ROI is user adoption; a tool that is not used provides no value, no matter how ‘good’ it is.”

As such, the challenge of the human element remains the most significant hurdle in any digital transformation. Simha believes that winning over stakeholders requires focusing on pain points rather than the technology itself – adoption happens when a new tool makes the old manual process feel unnecessarily difficult.

He points to modern tools like Copilot or Gemini as current examples that are helping employees realise they can remove hours of tedious tasks like comparing spreadsheets, eliminating work that is not creating value to focus on areas where their skills can be most usefully applied.

“Digital transformation is 80 per cent people and 20 per cent technology,” Simha notes. “The hardest part is breaking that ‘we’ve always done it this way’.”

“Change often feels like a threat until you prove it’s a solution. To convince stakeholders, I would not sell them on the technology itself; I would show them how it removes a specific pain point in their daily work.”

A flight path for maritime’s future

As an avid traveller and former private pilot, Simha has often looked to the aviation for inspiration and has been impressed by the IATA model of industry collaboration – an organisation that became a major influence on the creation of the DCSA. The ability of airlines to align a complex, global industry around common standards is a glimpse into what maritime could achieve if the will is there to embrace these challenges.

“Their success with the e-airwaybill (eAWB) for example, and the ‘internet of logistics’ concept (built on the ONE Record data-sharing standard) proves that when you move from proprietary silos to a shared digital language, you unlock massive efficiency,” he argues.

“I often say that if we want to ‘fly’ as an industry, we need to adopt that same level of collaborative standardisation.”

While his time at MSC has come to an end, Simha will continue working on promoting these concepts within the maritime industry, with the 100 per cent adoption of the eBL and the removal of the paper jam that has slowed down global trade for centuries a particular professional focus over the next few years.

More broadly, after four decades in the industry he also has a wish to mentor the next generation of digital leaders and advises young professionals in maritime today to focus on adaptability and building a level of comfort working with digital applications rather than mastering specific, fleeting tools.

“The ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn as technology cycles accelerate is an important one,” he said.

“Beyond that, master data literacy. You don’t need to be a coder, but you must know how to translate data into actionable business solutions.”

“From an industry perspective, I would like to see a maritime ecosystem that is fully interoperable. We should reach a point where data flows as seamlessly as a shipping container, without ‘digital islands’. Just a shared language that makes the entire global supply chain faster, more efficient, greener, and more transparent.”