Trade Win No. 6
TRUST IS THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF DIGITAL TRADE | Diana Zamora
Every day, a small manufacturer in Nairobi or a farmers' cooperative in Peru can sell to customers on the other side of the world. Cross-border digital trade has become a powerful engine of growth for developing countries — a way to reach global buyers without a warehouse or a brick-and-mortar bank. Yet, the largest untapped opportunity today lies in digitally delivered services — software, design and business-process work—which are growing faster than goods trade. Digital financial inclusion has fuelled this global trend: the World Bank's 2025 Findex shows that 61% of adults in developing economies make or receive a digital payment, up from 35% a decade ago. Firms and individuals have embraced the digital ecosystem because it delivers tangible benefits.
Recently, however, AI has posed new challenges. New forms of AI-enabled fraud are emerging. Criminals can use deepfakes and fabricated identities to steal card details at scale in one country, then sell them on the dark web and cash out in another. Global card-fraud losses hit $33.4 billion in 2024 and are on track to top $400 billion this decade. AI is accelerating the threat: Deloitte projects that AI could more than triple U.S. fraud losses, from $12.3 billion in 2023 to $40 billion by 2027. But the money stolen is only part of the cost: businesses and banks routinely refuse unfamiliar cross-border orders rather than risk the loss — and those become sales that small exporters never get to make.
The challenge for businesses is clear: how can they fill new orders while preventing fraud? Trust in the system is essential. It is a race between lawful commerce and those who want to defraud it.
The response is to remain interoperable. Modern AI systems score each payment against patterns from a global network, approving genuine transactions in seconds while flagging suspicious ones; they already screen billions of payments a year. A card tested in one country and run at scale in another goes undetected if the first bank's alert never reaches the global network. Without shared intelligence, each institution sees only part of the picture; with it, the card is flagged the moment it resurfaces. Data-localisation rules and siloed data lakes, however well-intentioned, create exactly the kind of blind spots where fraudsters gain, and trade partners lose.
Payment services and their fraud checks are already covered under the GATS. What is missing is not new law but new habits: interoperable national and global systems and standing public-private cooperation to share fraud intelligence and give cross-border buyers real redress, as UNCTAD urges. Trust is the bedrock of digital trade. If systems cannot keep pace with those who exploit them, the growth and opportunity digital trade promises to developing economies are at risk.
