Tech / What supply chain visibility gets wrong about ETA numbers and why it matters

Ask a visibility vendor about ETA [estimated time of arrival] accuracy and you will hear the same figure: 90%.

It appears in sales decks, RFP responses and conference keynotes – the industry has repeated it for so long that it has stopped asking what the number measures.

We asked. Over the past year we undertook 25 interviews across shippers, carriers, forwarders, visibility vendors and finance leaders. At a major global e-commerce operator, ETA accuracy on trackable shipments did reach 90%. But only 60% of the operator’s inbound volume was trackable at all. Across everything the company actually moved, effective accuracy was 54%.

Platforms report the first number. The second is the market reality.

This is survivorship bias, and logistics has institutionalised it. Accuracy is measured only across shipments that report. The shipments that report are the easy ones: main lanes, mature carriers, well-instrumented modes. The cargo that goes dark is the awkward cargo, transhipped, consolidated, passed between smaller carriers, crossing borders where data sharing stops. It is also the cargo carrying the most financial exposure per container. The metric flatters exactly where the flattery costs least.

The comfortable explanation is that this is a data problem, and more than 15 years of visibility investment should be closing it, but the evidence says otherwise. More than 300 vendors now sell supply chain visibility. Yet in McKinsey’s 2024 survey of supply chain leaders, tier-1 visibility reached 60% of respondents while tier-2 and beyond covered just 30%, down seven points year-on-year. Coverage is not converging on completeness. In places it is going backwards.

The gap survives because nobody is paid to close it. A senior chief digital officer at a global container line put it to us plainly: “Stakeholders make money on inefficiencies. Nobody in the system is paid to close the gap between cargo events and financial settlement.”

Visibility was built for operations, and that design choice set its ceiling. A late container appears as a dashboard alert for a logistics team. The alert changes a phone call, perhaps a booking. It changes nothing about the financing, the insurance or the working capital attached to the goods, because none of those positions can see it.

Finance sees the same event very differently. For an iron ore trader, a 12-hour ETA variance changes the financing cost on a $50m cargo. A trade finance lead at a commodity trading house told us: “If I can see the goods are delivered at the buyer’s premises and the receivable is born, that is a completely different risk profile than if goods are still floating. That changes everything, the financing terms, the cost of capital, the collateral requirements.”

Meanwhile the global trade finance gap stands at $2.5 trillion, roughly 10% of annual merchandise trade, and the Asian Development Bank’s 2025 survey confirms it has not moved since 2023 despite heavy digitisation. Banks still price risk from documents that arrive days after the cargo. Much of that gap is not a shortage of capital. It is a shortage of verified information a financier can act on without absorbing fraud risk.

Consider what changes when a cargo event is treated as a financial event. A reefer on the Sumatra to Hamburg lane carries a consignment that secures a $4m working capital advance, under a cargo policy priced on the assumption the cold chain holds. Off Gibraltar the unit runs warm for six hours. The moment the breach is verified at source, three positions move at once. The insurer’s exposure rises and a parametric clause adjusts the premium reserve. The lender’s collateral value falls and the advance rate steps down. The treasury team watches the working capital line tighten before the vessel has docked. No document changed hands and no claim was filed. One verified cargo event repriced an insurance position, a credit position and a liquidity position in the same minute.

No tracking platform delivers that today, and not for technical reasons.

TradeLens had the technology: 300 ecosystem members, 10 ocean carriers, 1.5bn logged events. It shut down because Maersk owned the platform it was asking rival carriers to join. Competitors will not surrender commercial data to a structure controlled by a rival, and they are rational not to. The fix is governance: raw data stays with the party that generated it, and only the financial consequence, a repriced delay, a revalued reroute, an updated insurance position, travels upward to the parties whose money is at stake.

The timing is no longer open-ended. The EU Data Act took effect in September 2025, mandating machine-readable portability from connected cargo devices. The Battery Passport arrives in 2027, CSRD Scope 3 reporting and the due diligence directive in 2027 to 2028. None of these were designed to create a cargo finance market. Together they force cargo-event data into exactly the auditable, standardised formats that the market requires. The window runs from now to 2028.

The 90% figure will keep appearing in vendor decks. The useful response is a single question: across what share of total shipments? The 36-point gap between the number quoted and the number experienced is where insurance premiums, collateral values and a $2.5 trillion financing shortfall currently sit unpriced.

A cargo event is a financial event. Until the industry measures it that way, it will keep grading itself on its best shipments and financing the worst ones blind.

This is a guest post by Slawomir Wycislak, PhD, a researcher at Jagiellonian University, Kraków, and Stefan Reidy, chief executive of Atexxa Group, Zug.

Their white paper, The Floating Balance Sheet, reports findings from the SC-CEOP research programme.