Electronic bill of lading (eBL) adoption has reached 51.1%, according to the FIT Alliance’s 2026 global survey, up from 49.2% in 2024 and 33% in 2022.
BIMCO is a founding member of the alliance.
The findings indicate that eBL use is becoming more established: 11.2% of respondents now use eBLs exclusively, compared with 7.5% in 2024.
As adoption grows, the industry’s focus is shifting from legal acceptance towards practical implementation. Interoperability and platform fragmentation were the concerns cited most frequently by respondents, followed by legal effectiveness and authenticity verification, and implementation and onboarding at scale.
The survey confirms that interoperability is now a central concern for scaling eBL adoption. The industry has made important progress, but the next phase must enable electronic trade documents and trusted data to move securely and efficiently across different platforms, jurisdictions and participants.
Strong support for digital transformation
The business case for eBLs remains widely recognised. Some 93.8% of respondents regard them as an enabler of broader digital transformation in trade, broadly unchanged from 94% in 2024.
Faster processing was ranked as the leading benefit, followed by improved handling, greater data accuracy, enhanced security and cost savings. Around two-thirds of respondents also considered reduced paper use and lower transport emissions important.
Banking adoption remains limited
Banks continue to lag behind the wider market. Just 22.2% of bank respondents reported at least partial eBL use, compared with 21.1% in 2024.
According to the survey, wider banking adoption will require assurance that the control, status and transfer of an eBL can be verified as it moves between platforms and participants—not only within an individual provider’s system.
The FIT Alliance argues that eBLs must ultimately become portable, structured and standards-based data objects capable of moving across systems and jurisdictions.
The FIT Alliance and its partners are committed to advancing this collective effort and turning interoperability into a practical reality for global trade.
The survey drew on 190 cleaned responses collected through the networks of ICC, BIMCO, DCSA, FIATA and Swift. Data compilation and analytics were conducted by Shanghai Maritime University, with interpretive analysis co-authored with the Digital Supply Chain Institute.
