The World Trade Board today announced the addition of a new initiative on sustainable trade, alongside its existing three initiatives, as part of its pledge to advance standards and digitalisation in global trade finance.

Sessions on each initiative will be taking place at the upcoming World Trade Symposium in London on 6-7 June 2017. The event brings together global leaders, influencers and subject matter experts from banks, corporates, industry bodies and not-for-profits to discuss how trade can be transformed to drive financial inclusion through globalisation and digitisation. The four initiatives include:

●     Supporting the development of sustainable trade – This new initiative and working group will be co-chaired by Leanne Kemp, Founder & CEO of Everledger who was recently appointed to the World Trade Board. Everledger has built a distributed ledger to track the provenance of luxury goods throughout the supply chain. The group will explore the potential to apply similar technology to monitor the ethical provenance of goods in support of sustainable trade within a circular economy.

●     Widening inclusion in global trade for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) – The recent appointment of Berna Ozsar, Secretary General of the World SME Forum, to the World Trade Board supports her mandate of opening up access to trade finance for SMEs, helping to close today’s $1.6 trillion global trade finance funding gap.

●     Driving global adoption of Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) – Gerard Hartsink, Chairman of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) and member of the World Trade Board, will play a key role in driving greater adoption of LEIs by global businesses, as well as SMEs. The objective is to improve transparency, support trade finance digitalisation and streamline onboarding and risk management along global financial supply chains in order to underpin more inclusive trade and SME finance.

●     Increasing the level of digitisation of trade through education and encouraging adoption – The fourth working group pledges to enhance awareness of the potential of new technologies such as blockchain and distributed ledger across the different parts of the trade ecosystem, from producers to collateral managers to shipping firms, as well as banks, governments and non-governmental organisations. This working group is led by Enrico Camerinelli, Senior Research Analyst at Aite Group.

“The goal of the World Trade Board and our four strategic initiatives is to promote the vision of an inclusive, prosperous and beneficial trade ecosystem by advancing standards, governance and digital technologies in global trade. Ultimately it’s about securing long-term sustainable trade for the good of all,” said Simon Paris, Co-chair of the World Trade Board and President at Misys. “We look forward to welcoming our distinguished keynotes and participants to this year’s World Trade Symposium.”

Ambassador Michael Froman, former US Trade Representative, will keynote at the event, offering his insight into the rapidly-changing world of global trade. For further information on the World Trade Symposium 2017 and details of the agenda visit:

www.Worldtradesymposium.com