Indonesia’s Next Digital Trade Challenge Is Interoperability

ASEAN’s conclusion of negotiations on the Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA) in May 2026 marks a shift from rule-making to implementation. With the agreement expected to be signed in November, the next challenge is ensuring that electronic transactions, data flows, payments, and trade documents can work across different systems and jurisdictions.

For Indonesia, that challenge begins at home. The country has made significant progress in digitalization, but many systems operated by businesses, banks, logistics providers, and government agencies still function within their own institutional boundaries. Indonesian SMEs, for example, have adopted digital tools much faster for finding suppliers and reaching customers than for digitizing internal business processes and analytics.

IBC Navigator Vol. 22 describes this progression through four stages: digitization, integration, interoperability, and orchestration. The objective is not only to digitize processes but also to ensure that information can move across institutions and ultimately support an end-to-end transaction.

“Indonesia has made strong progress in digitalization, but the next challenge is making sure these systems can actually work together. We need to look beyond whether individual processes are already digital and focus on whether a transaction can move end-to-end across businesses, institutions and borders with less friction,” said Director of Policy and Program IBC Prayoga Wiradisuria.

The gap becomes more visible across borders. Indonesia scored 96.3% for domestic paperless trade in the 2025 UN Global Survey on Digital and Sustainable Trade Facilitation, compared with 66.7% for cross-border paperless trade. Once a transaction moves into another jurisdiction, electronic information must be recognized and trusted by institutions operating under different legal, technical, and administrative systems.

Electronic bills of lading illustrate the challenge. Legal recognition of electronic transferable records is important, but it does not automatically ensure that carriers, banks, platforms, buyers, and customs authorities can use the same record seamlessly. Indonesia’s experience with QRIS offers a useful principle: interoperability does not require every provider to use the same platform. Different systems can remain distinct while connecting through common standards. 

IBC recommends assessing digital readiness at the transaction level. By tracing real export journeys from beginning to end, Indonesia can identify where bottlenecks emerge and build a trade architecture that makes cross-border transactions easier, faster and more reliable for businesses.