Introduction

Maritime digitalisation promises exciting possibilities: autonomous ships, smart ports, paperless trading, electronic bills of lading, etc. However, realising this ambition is challenging. Its success depends on the ability to coordinate shipowners, charterers, cargo interests, banks, insurers, ports, freight forwarders, and digital service providers on the adoption of new digital standards, new technologies, and new business practices, as well as the sharing of data. This is challenging, not only between members of different business categories, but also between competitors within the same category.

Stakeholder Cooperation

For maritime digitalisation to succeed, the shipping industry needs a conductor—much like an orchestra conductor—to coordinate its many stakeholders. This is because the standardised and interoperable frameworks for data exchange depend on broad, voluntary participation across the industry. While shipping has administrative and regulatory institutions, such as the IMO, they typically adopt a technology neutral approach and do not mandate the adoption of specific digital systems. Beyond international institutions, a number of transnational institutions, including BIMCO, IACS, and the ICC, help facilitate maritime digitalisation but they also do not compel the adoption of digital systems. As a result, no single institutional leader has both the mandate and authority to act as the conductor of this complex digital and business transformation, although industry-led initiatives such as DCSA and GSBN have assumed increasingly significant roles. Ultimately, stakeholder coordination largely depends on stakeholder cooperation, which in turn requires mutual confidence in each other.

Mutual Confidence

Mutual confidence may be supported by legal rules, contractual protections, technological safeguards, and insurance coverage. While these mechanisms serve important functions, they are primarily designed to provide assurance rather than to build trust. They can facilitate cooperative outcomes, but often at higher cost—a relevant consideration for maritime stakeholders. Trust, by contrast, is less expensive¹ but requires a willingness to accept vulnerability.

Most maritime stakeholders are only willing to cooperate on digitalisation when they perceive adequate assurances to be in place.² However, technological deficiencies and legal gaps weaken such assurances, discouraging cooperative motivations unless trust compensates for the inadequacy of assurances.

Trust and Cooperation

Trust requires vulnerability, but vulnerability exposes stakeholders to external factors and opportunistic behaviour. In the context of digital shipping, possible outcomes include experiencing network outage, having confidential information disclosed without authorisation, and having data monetised beyond agreed purposes. These outcomes can be highly damaging to maritime stakeholders and undermine confidence in digital systems.

Maritime stakeholders must accept a degree of risk when cooperating on maritime digitalisation. This is because assurances are not inexhaustible, and over-reliance on them can have a counterproductive effect on the ability to maintain cooperation. Each additional layer of assurance displaces, rather than resolves, the question of trust, raising the further question of whether the assurance itself can be trusted. Eventually, stakeholders cannot avoid the need to trust: they must accept vulnerability or choose not to cooperate. The consequence is that maritime stakeholders must cooperate not only when their reliance is accompanied by assurances, but also on the basis of mutual trust—each party choosing to expose its vulnerabilities to other parties in a mutual group because it does not perceive such an exposure to be accompanied by risk, and expecting that the goodwill will be reciprocated. ³

Trust-disrupting Systems

Some commentators call blockchain a ‘trust machine’. In reality, it is better described as a ‘verification machine’. It uses a digital system to verify and audit records, assuring users that the data contains no discrepancies. However, this method does not automatically build trust. In other words, blockchain is designed for cooperation notwithstanding the lack of trust, not for fostering trust. For this reason, efforts to build trust using blockchain are misguided, and the failure of TradeLens serves as proof that blockchain alone cannot overcome adoption challenges.⁴

Trust-disrupting systems can nevertheless support maritime digitalisation. For example, privacy-preserving systems, such as zero-knowledge proofs and privacy-by-design systems, can help reconcile the competing demands between shipowners’, charterers’, and cargo interests’ preference for commercial opacity and regulators’, banks’, and ports’ ambitions for greater visibility.⁵ Even trust-minimising systems, such as zero-trust cybersecurity posture, can improve confidence in digital systems. Such a posture is more costly but cybersecurity is one context in which tolerance for vulnerability is neither appropriate nor prudent.

Compatible System

Maritime digitalisation requires a coordination system compatible with how the shipping industry is organised. Many existing approaches rely on a platform-centric governance model, in which coordination is shaped by technical architecture, contractual rules, and access controls. While such platforms can function effectively in relatively consolidated markets (e.g., container shipping) or hierarchical settings, they are less suited to fragmented, non-hierarchical segments of the commercial shipping market. Platform operators also tend to wield asymmetric power, which raises persistent concerns about neutrality, data governance, and long-term commitment.

Digital Mutual Association

I recommend creating a ‘digital mutual association’ for maritime digitalisation. This would take the form of a non-profit, member-owned organisation tasked with pooling digitalisation risks, governing shared digital infrastructure, and aligning stakeholder incentives over time. Members would collectively bear the risks inherent in maritime digitalisation, such as cyber incidents, system failures, data breaches, regulatory non-compliance, and vendor failure or exit. Rather than leaving each member to manage such risks individually, the costs of remediation, compensation, and recovery would be shared among members, pre-funded through collective contributions, and governed under a common institutional framework. This would mutualise digitalisation risks, aligning incentives, and reducing the deterrent effect that concentrated or uncertain liability would otherwise have on participation.

This model draws on the shipping industry’s long-standing reliance on mutuality to preserve trust, as demonstrated by established mutual structures such as the International Group of P&I Clubs. Although P&I Clubs play an important role in supporting digitalisation, they do not mutualise the core risks of maritime digital systems themselves. Their function is primarily to insure the downstream legal consequences of digitalisation, rather than to govern or share responsibility for the digital infrastructure, standards, or coordination mechanisms on which those systems depend. As liability mutuals, P&I Clubs are designed for ex post loss allocation. However, maritime digitalisation presents ex ante coordination problems involving systemic risk, platform governance, network effects, and first-mover disadvantages. Even where P&I Clubs insure liabilities arising from electronic bills of lading or other digital systems, they support adoption only at the margins and do not function as a coordinating institution for digital transformation.

Existing industry initiatives, including standards-setting bodies and platform consortia, largely operate on an assurance-based model rather than a mutual governance model. While these initiatives have contributed meaningfully to maritime digitalisation, their primary function is to strengthen assurances (e.g., technical reliability, legal certainty, and interoperability) rather than to cultivate trust through shared risk and reciprocal commitment. This suggests a complementary need to mutualise digitalisation risks through a mutual association, which is better suited to addressing trust deficits and more closely aligned with the non-hierarchical nature of the shipping industry.

Conclusion

Maritime digitalisation offers the prospect of economies of scale, process optimisation, and efficiency gains. However, these benefits can materialise only if strong network effects are sustained through long-term, voluntary participation. This makes a high-trust system as important as a high-assurance system for advancing the industry’s digital ambitions. Fragmented or uncoordinated approaches to digitalisation may yield isolated gains, but they are unlikely to achieve industry-wide standardisation and interoperability in data exchange necessary for digitalisation to be transformative. A more promising approach is to embed mutuality through governance arrangements that are compatible with the non-hierarchical nature of the shipping industry. If successfully implemented, a digital mutual association could materially improve the prospects of maritime digitalisation.

¹ See Elson Ong, ‘Digitalising Commercial Shipping: The Relevance of Trust’ (PhD Thesis, National University of Singapore, 2024) 295–297.
² ibid 384–386.
³ ibid 284–286, 323.
⁴ Daniel Logan, ‘Rival Criticizes Strategy Behind TradeLens: “Which Problem Does It Solve?”’ ShippingWatch (Copenhagen, 9 December 2022).
⁵ Ong (n 1) 156–158, 386–388; DCSA, The State of the Industry Report: Insights on Digital Evolution in Container Shipping by DCSA (2024) 12.