More than half of respondents to the 2026 FIT Alliance electronic Bill of Lading (eBL) survey now use electronic bills of lading, either exclusively or alongside paper documents, with interoperability identified as the main barrier to wider adoption.
The survey found that 51.1% of respondents use eBLs, up from 49.2% in 2024. However, only 11.2% have moved entirely away from paper, while 39.9% continue to operate both formats in parallel.
A total of 93.8% of respondents identified eBLs as a key enabler of wider trade digitalisation, with faster processing, improved data accuracy, security and reduced administrative costs among the reported benefits.
Interoperability and fragmentation between platforms were the most frequently cited obstacles to adoption, followed by legal effectiveness and authenticity verification, and implementation and onboarding at scale.
The findings suggest that the challenge is increasingly centred on transferring and verifying electronic documents across different systems, jurisdictions and participants, rather than establishing the legal recognition of eBLs. Banking remains a particular obstacle, only 22.2% of bank respondents reporting at least partial eBL use.
The FIT Alliance was established by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), BIMCO, the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA), the International Federation of Freight Forwarders Associations (FIATA) and Swift.
The research was conducted with Shanghai Maritime University and the Digital Supply Chain Institute (DSCI) and draws on 190 cleaned survey records collected through the member networks of ICC, BIMCO, DCSA, FIATA, and Swift.
