According to The Loadstar, supply chain visibility vendors routinely claim 90% estimated time of arrival (ETA) accuracy — but that figure applies only to trackable shipments, which represent just 60% of total inbound volume for a major global e-commerce operator. Across all shipments, effective ETA accuracy fell to 54%, revealing a 36-point gap between marketed performance and operational reality.
Survivorship Bias Masks Real Visibility Gaps
The industry’s standard 90% ETA accuracy metric suffers from institutionalised survivorship bias: it measures only shipments that report data — typically those moving on main lanes, with mature carriers, and via well-instrumented transport modes. Shipments that go dark — transhipped cargo, consolidated loads, handoffs between smaller regional carriers, or cross-border movements where data sharing halts — are excluded from the calculation. Yet these untracked shipments carry disproportionately high financial exposure per container. As Slawomir Wycislak, PhD, researcher at Jagiellonian University, Kraków, and Stefan Reidy, chief executive of Atexxa Group, Zug, note in their white paper The Floating Balance Sheet:
“The metric flatters exactly where the flattery costs least.”
Coverage Stagnates Despite Proliferation of Vendors
More than 300 vendors now sell supply chain visibility solutions, yet coverage remains fragmented. McKinsey’s 2024 survey found tier-1 visibility reached only 60% of supply chain leaders, while tier-2 and deeper visibility covered just 30% — down 7 percentage points year-on-year. This decline confirms that visibility is not converging toward completeness; in key segments, it is receding.
Finance Sees Cargo Events Differently Than Operations
Visibility platforms were built for operational teams — not finance functions. A late container triggers a dashboard alert and perhaps a rescheduled booking, but it changes nothing for financing, insurance, or working capital positions because those stakeholders lack real-time access. For an iron ore trader, a 12-hour ETA variance alters the financing cost on a $50 million cargo. A trade finance lead at a commodity trading house explained:
“If I can see the goods are delivered at the buyer’s premises and the receivable is born, that is a completely different risk profile than if goods are still floating. That changes everything — the financing terms, the cost of capital, the collateral requirements.”
A $2.5 Trillion Trade Finance Gap Persists
The global trade finance gap stands at $2.5 trillion — roughly 10% of annual merchandise trade — and has remained unchanged since 2023, according to the Asian Development Bank’s 2025 survey. Banks continue pricing risk based on documents arriving days after cargo movement, not verified real-time events. Much of this gap reflects not capital scarcity, but a shortage of auditable, fraud-resistant data that financiers can act upon immediately.
Governance, Not Technology, Is the Bottleneck
TradeLens had the technical infrastructure — 300 ecosystem members, 10 ocean carriers, and 1.5 billion logged events — yet shut down because Maersk owned the platform it asked rival carriers to join. Competitors rationally refused to surrender commercial data to a structure controlled by a competitor. The solution lies in governance: raw cargo-event data stays with its originator, while only financially consequential outcomes — such as a repriced delay, revalued reroute, or updated insurance position — flow upward to stakeholders whose capital is at risk.
Regulatory Momentum Accelerates Standardisation
The EU Data Act took effect in September 2025, mandating machine-readable portability from connected cargo devices. The Battery Passport arrives in 2027, followed by CSRD Scope 3 reporting and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive between 2027 and 2028. None were designed to enable cargo finance — yet collectively, they compel cargo-event data into auditable, standardised formats required by lenders, insurers, and treasuries. The window to align systems runs from now through 2028.
The persistent 90% ETA claim will remain in vendor decks — but the only useful response is a single question: Across what share of total shipments? That 36-point gap sits directly beneath unpriced insurance premiums, eroded collateral values, and the $2.5 trillion financing shortfall. As the authors conclude: A cargo event is a financial event. Until the industry measures it that way, it will keep grading itself on its best shipments — and financing its worst ones blind.
Source: The Loadstar
Compiled from international media by the SCI.AI editorial team.
