Nitron Group LLC, a global leader of fertilizer trade, and Secro, the next-generation digital bill of lading platform, announces today that they have successfully completed the first end-to-end transaction in the world without a private rulebook agreement between participants. This delivered unprecedented speed of execution and legal robustness.

Lack of widespread recognition at country-level and necessity to sign cumbersome private agreements have so far hampered the widespread use of electronic bills of lading. Secro solves these problems with an innovative approach and proprietary technology that gained fast adoption from customers, requiring the parties to agree to terms and conditions that are way more agile than the traditional private rulebook.

Nitron Group used Secro to carry out a buy-sell transaction involving six counterparties located across three continents. The trade involved a shipment of liquid fertilizer from North America to Chile, managed through agents at both load port and discharge port. Thanks to its multi-jurisdictional legal validity and the flexibility of its collaborative environment, Secro made the replacement of paper bills of lading seamless and robust. Secro enabled the buyer to obtain the possession of cargo much quicker than usual. The buyer received a signed original eBL in less than a minute after the transfer was initiated.

The onboarding of all the trading partners, the training of the users and the legal clearance from each corporate counsel took just a week. Secro empowered all parties in the transaction to securely draft online, negotiate in real time, e-sign, and digitally interchange the electronic bill of lading within hours.

Secro enables the easy export proof of original documents, the attachment of supporting files to the e-bill of lading and conversion of the latter into paper form, smoothly satisfying the bank’s compliance prerequisites and local customs requirements.

“The simplicity of the sign-up process and intuitiveness of the platform allowed for a seamless on-boarding experience and easy adoption,” said Felix, Dostmann, VP Project Management at Nitron. “Thanks to Secro we can save a substantial amount of working capital days and reduce the risk of our operations.”

“The idea that e-bills of lading need to be approved in 200 countries to work is a wrong assumption. With force of law across multiple jurisdictions and no private agreements, Secro creates new opportunities for traders and their customers to improve their bottom line up to 10%,” says Michele Sancricca, CEO and Co-founder of Secro. “Our sophisticated tokenization of assets makes Secro particularly suitable to also fulfill a banks’ need for a scalable and more secure alternative to paper documents and legacy e-bills of lading.”