The 57th Pan Asian e-Commerce Alliance (PAA) Steering Committee and Working Group Meetings, hosted by CrimsonLogic, were held in Singapore from 7 to 9 May 2018. The representatives from PAA member economies included Hong Kong SAR, Indonesia, Japan, Macao SAR, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand attended these meetings.

The PAA Chairman Mr. Saw Ken Wye welcomed the guests in the PAA Gala Night and reiterated our commitment to promote frictionless global trade. Speed is a key business differentiator and our efforts to accelerate movement of good with seamless exchange of information digitally is critical. The bilateral and multi-lateral collaboration between PAA members is helping drive this momentum forward. He also noted the keen interest among members in adopting new technologies like Block chain for trade facilitation.

Just last month, Taiwan Customs and Trade-Van announced the completion of the technical integration of the cross-border Electronic Certificate of Origin Exchange (eCO) with PAA partners from Singapore (CrimsonLogic) and Thailand (CAT). When launched in May 2018, it will reduce time and cost for the trading community when compared to the manual process for paper based certificates. This demonstrates the strong government and private sector partnerships to push the boundaries for faster, better, cross-border paperless trade.

Speaking at the PAA Gala Night, Mr. Ho Chee Pong, Director-General of Singapore Customs said: “I commend the forward-looking efforts by PAA to promote and enable trusted exchange of digital data and documents to engender seamless trade across borders. This is very much in line with the strategic vision adopted by Singapore when we set out to build the National Trade Platform (NTP) and I welcome opportunities to collaborate between PAA members and the NTP.”

CrimsonLogic Chairman Mr. Eugene Wong added that PAA has served the B2B2G connector well to facilitate trade flows for the last 18 years since its incorporation in 2000. With the rise of eCommerce, he urged PAA to tap on this growth and continue to bring innovation and technology in trade to the global arena. He also encouraged PAA to set a target to extend its members from the current 11 to 25 economies.

PAA will continue to play a key role in facilitating cross-border digital trade and hope to bridge more Asian economies with secure and seamless trade regulatory documents exchange network.

The next PAA Steering Committee and Working Group Meetings will be held from 7 to 9 November 2018 in Japan.

About Pan Asian e-Commerce Alliance
The Pan Asian e-Commerce Alliance (“PAA”) aims to promote and provide secure, trusted, reliable and value-adding IT infrastructure and facilities to enhance seamless trade globally. PAA was founded in 2000. Current PAA Members comprise CAT of Thailand, CIECC of China, CrimsonLogic of Singapore, Dagang Net of Malaysia, InterCommerce of the Philippines, KTNET of Korea, NACCS of Japan, TEDMEV of Macao SAR, Tradelink of Hong Kong SAR, Trade-Van of Taiwan and PT EDI-I of Indonesia. Combined customer base of the PAA members now exceeds 340,000 organisations, representing almost all active trading enterprises in the Asian market.

For more information about PAA, please visit https://paa.net.