Strengthening Customs Compliance Whitepaper

Trade compliance teams have never had this much to track at once: shifting tariff policy, expanding sanctions, sustainability and deforestation obligations, rising scrutiny from authorities well beyond the usual countries, and a steady stream of country-specific rules, all landing on the same teams and often the same underlying data. Our whitepaper Strengthening Customs Compliance explores why manual approaches can no longer keep pace, and what actually builds lasting control.

The whitepaper draws on three sources: a live webinar with poll data from customs professionals across industries, a virtual roundtable with trade compliance leaders from six organisations spanning pharma, chemicals, automotive and more, and responses to a single question posed to trade compliance leaders: if you could eliminate one compliance risk tomorrow, which would it be and why?

The data reveals a consistent picture. Keeping up with regulatory change is the top concern for trade professionals, ahead of data quality and accuracy. When asked how long it would take to produce an audit report if customs requested it tomorrow, answers ranged from a few minutes to more than two weeks, a gap that says more about how automated a business's data already is than which rules it happens to be facing. Real-time visibility into duty spend and shipment status was named the single most wanted improvement, ahead of better reporting or stronger audit readiness.

Roundtable participants pointed to data accuracy as the shared bottleneck behind almost everything else, along with the value of direct, accountable relationships with the parties actually filing declarations. The whitepaper also looks at how companies are actually preparing for what's coming, including a look at how many are still unaware of the scale of change ahead, and sets out what leading teams are already doing to shift from broker dependency to direct, automated control.

In short, this whitepaper covers: