TradeTech: The Future of World Trade

By: Dr. Juan Carlos Ordóñez, CEO of Mesoamerica Import and Export Inc. and Partner at IMPULSORA April 1, 2025

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF (2023)), throughout history, new technologies have revolutionized commercial exchange, driving growth and trade diversification. Notable examples include containerization, the credit card, and, perhaps most powerfully, the internet. Today, driven by a new generation of applications called TradeTech, the sector is ready to advance again. For this reason, in January 2024, the WEF and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) held the forum “TradeTech: Catalysing Innovation.” This Global TradeTech initiative seeks to revolutionize world trade using the latest technological innovations available.
For Mesoamérica Import & Export Inc (MIX), the key to this process lies in having a clear vision of the value chain. If it is not designed in detail and understood in depth, this work could be inefficient, with enormous expenditures of time and money and no significant progress toward the global objective. For this purpose, it is important to understand and differentiate between the main links of the global trade value chain and the services surrounding them in each region or zone, as the actors and their idiosyncrasies are the engine that drives trade. For example, a single product or service involves the isolated work of companies, conglomerates, clusters, regions, state, federal, and country authorities, as well as regional or global organizations. These complex interactions in global trade complicate the functioning of the system.
For this reason, the “TradeTech: Catalysing Innovation” forum (2024) established that some of the most promising innovations of recent years—such as distributed ledger technology, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, and the Internet of Things—offer opportunities for radical change in global trade. However, the transformative potential of these technologies cannot be realized unless the various members of the trade ecosystem collaborate on their implementation. The Global TradeTech initiative articulates a vision for how the diverse interests in the trade community can work together (by sharing costs, covering risks, and directing substantial investments) to achieve technological transformation. The initiative fills a gap in global collaboration by linking entrepreneurs and investors with regulators and established industry leaders, fostering open dialogue and commitment. The initiative initially focuses on four areas considered ripe for transformation: logistics, trade finance, carbon reduction, and trade compliance.