Electronic Presentation of Documents? It’s Already Happening

A common topic of discussion among letter of credit practitioners these days is, “When are we going to start seeing electronic presentation of documents?” We have had rules in place specifically to support electronic documents since the first eUCP was formulated to supplement the UCP500 in 2002. Recently, the eUCP was updated to version 2.1 and rules were published for electronic presentation of documents for collection, called the “eURC”. Meanwhile, ISP98 was written, back in 1998, so as to accommodate electronic presentation of documents. Since we are still not seeing any electronic presentations (beyond questionable proof-of-concept cases), it seems these rules were all ahead of their time. They do not reflect actual practice, like ICC rules usually do. Rather, they are meant to create a roadmap. But, perhaps practice has decided to follow a different path.