 Welcome to the next DSCI Insights in Action. Actually, today we are in Dubai on Global Freight Summit 2023 and I'm very pleased to have with me today Lance Lin, the co-founder and CEO of Blue X-Trade. So, welcome Lance. Thank you, appreciate it. Let's kick-start the conversation and let's take it towards what's always interesting, it's like what's cooking and what's new and we know that Blue X-Trade is interested in opening up, let's say, an open source e-bill of lading, trying to make it a global, let's say, applicable tool and we know a lot of people started it and tried and can you tell us more about it and why you think this one will be different? Right, right. I think, you know, the trade documents are actually extremely important obviously and I think the bill lading is one of the most important ones. It is obviously the key for title transfer between parties and that's why it's often called a documentation of value and I think throughout the years, I mean, I think the supply chain community understands the value of digitizing it instead of going paperless, going paperless and so, there are lots of benefits I can think of that's the decreased amount of workflow required, right? Reduction of fraud and potentially just illumination of potential frictions between trade and I think this one McKinsey research I remembered that an average of 16 hours has been spent to facilitate the bill lading about 50 billion dollars that are lost to fraud because of the documentations and the potential of 55 billion dollars that can be created to value for reduction of friction and that's not to mention that other potentials if we digitize the bill lading such as the workflow surrounding it the digital cargo insurance, the digital custom brokerage that can be done on top of the EBL platform so why has not been done, right? That's actually the elephant in the room and I personally believe there's actually two reasons one is the capability problem and one is the neutrality problem the capability is not everybody within the community has the financial resources or technological resources to facilitate this not every single shipper or freight forwarder or even freight forwarding software has that capability and even if they use a SAS or something to accomplish it there's actually a very high cost involved bill lading during COVID is about 50 dollars per transaction that's extremely high really and then there's the second portion, the neutrality side I believe that if freight forwarder A has put all his data in the freight forwarder B which created the EBL I think there will be some issues within that in terms of neutrality and data security and so I think these are the two biggest bottlenecks and I believe the only solution is to really have a neutral open source platform that is shared by everyone and really wide open and I believe it should be hosted and championed in a non-profit organization no different from USB IF, the USB implementation forum and what's a better organization to do it than DSCI after all we have a lot of community ample participants that are interested in making a change in the community and it also has a sister institute which is in cybersecurity perfect and so I think this will definitely make a change and hopefully through this DSCI EBL initiative that we can become the champions of the beginning of the entire digitalization in the supply chain industry Thank you very much Lance I think it's a very inspirational goal joining forces is something which can help accelerate global trade and especially give small and medium size enterprises a chance to compete and go forward is always a great thing to have us so let's take the step forward and let's look we are talking about digitization part of digitization is always connected with AI the power of AI so what's happening with AI and its application in supply chain so how do you see the power of AI building up on what blue X trade is? Sure I think AI and in particularly generative AI is extremely important in the supply chain world our industry the supply chain community is known for its lack of standards not only for the documentation exchange but also for the data standards within the documents most companies has a legacy system various carriers still use FTP and EDIs and that's very human intensive in terms of human intervention, labor intensive and not to mention that there's a lot of real-time information cannot be communicated within these different systems and that's why so many people love Excel as we talked about yesterday and that's not really the tool for the future I think generative AI has the capability to actually interpret a lot of data it has two advantages one it comprehends the data from different sources very well, different documents very well and second it facilitates the translation in real-time so it allows the different legacy systems to communicate extremely quickly without a standard open documentation and so we can use this as a tool before systems, standards are established such as EBL as we mentioned earlier and so one thing that Blue Axis that we are heavily invested both in generative AI and traditional AI and the reason is that without the standards such as EBL right now we have to use generative AI to read the documents all the processing document invoices the bill ladings, the packing lists using generative AI from different sources different vendors, different carriers and so forth and that will be complemented by traditional AI to do fraud checks with existing systems and by doing so we can ensure that all our transactions all the KYC and KYBs are secure so our capital deployed will be the safest possible so it's actually moving towards greater transparency greater value for all the stakeholders within the supply chain side but as well providing the service you are building another level of value for all of those involved yes for sure so let's tell us a little bit more about the collaboration and cooperation with the DSEI members how Blue Axe trade is actually living through it and through the community which DSEI has built I think it's always interesting to learn how the members are engaging together and on the other side how they build value towards what their goals are because every single member has a different focus in that sense but on the other side combining goals together gives a bigger puzzle so we always ask these questions in a sense of sharing the experience and actually really surprised this is one of the few organizations within the industry that is really open for change any crazy ideas as an entrepreneur I throw up when talking to a lot of the members yesterday and in the earlier days they're all very open in fact they are urging for this change they are championing this change and so I think when I mentioned the EBL initiative instead of the typical resistance I get from different organizations or partners within the industry we are getting like I can contribute to this I can contribute to that it really inspires me and I believe that we are in the right place and that's why I want to DSEI is actually one of the places where I believe that I can make an open contribution and that's why BlueX is committed to providing these base codes these basic hosting technologies for free to the community because I think we can all add towards this overall initiative to digitize the supply chain industry so extremely excited thank you very much Lance and I think you really rounded up the conversation well