Thank you to Dr Momchil Antov, the facilitator of the part of the workshop on competencies of customs brokers, for writing an overview of results. Please see attached (e-version here). You are kindly invited to share your comments and views!

On another topic, when you post in the forum and click on “comment”, it takes some time for the comment to be published. Please note that the website will be updated and improved during the summer. And until then – thank you for your patience :-)

Dear Members,

First of all, I’d like to congratulate the organisers and participants of the European Customs Practitioners’ Conference that took place in Vilnius, Lithuania and ONLINE on May 25-26, 2023. It was a really great event.

I would also like to thank the participants of the workshop “Increasing Competencies in the field of Customs” for their insightful contributions.

I’m pleased to inform you that the news about this workshop has already been published on the CKI platform. Please find the link below:

https://exsitec6.sg-host.com/news/ckc-members-workshop-increasing-competencies-in-the-field-of-customs-completed/

Kind regards,
Ilona Mishchenko
Community Forum Administrator

Dear all,

Due to the importance of Blockchain in the future of Customs, I’m not sure if you are aware but IBM along with most important European Banks (Santander, DB, Unicredit, etc.) have designed a software called We.Trade to ease international trade transactions and since operations were launched last year, I believe it has been an absolute success.

The idea is to connect buyers, sellers, and banks in order to simplify transactions such as Letters of Credits, Export collections, etc which from my previous experience working in the manufacturing industry is a huge burden.

However, I believe they are willing to further expand to other branches within Trade Operations, as for example establishing a direct link with Customs for IP/OP/TA and other procedures which might imply VAT/Duty exemptions through bank guarantees.

I don’t know if we there will be time for this but dedicating some space for this will definitely be of interest, specially if we are considering the Manufacturing Sector as one of our Discussion groups.

Trade finance is a very important part of trade operations and I believe it is highly respected, however many employees working on International Trade feel reluctant to be trained on this aspects due to implications it might have (large amounts of money transactions) and decide to just rely on banks and financial bodies to the work for them.

Offering some space in our workshop on the topic (Blockchain&Trade finance, could help us to differentiate ourselves from other intitutions.

Sorry, for the long text.

Thanks,

Barbara

Hi Momchil,
Thank you very much for your suggestion. Look forward to meeting you tomorrow!

Dear All,

We are meeting with Kjetil tomorrow at 12:00 CET time, as mentioned in the previous message, you are welcome to join:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89611003643?pwd=NC9JQWJZYlhra0grT3NnWTE2a3liZz09
Kind regards,
Enrika

Dear Enrika,

Interesting suggestion, I am more than happy to contribute if desired.

Dear All,
Thank you very much to Debora for the Minutes. Regarding CKC Workshop on 26 May, if you All would agree, I would suggest the topic of Customs Knowledge Management, which is relevant for everyone and we could create various working groups. I’d like also to invite CKC members to lead the groups, for example, maybe Diege would agree to lead the Customs brokers’ working group, Ivo – the group of International manufacturing companies, and Boryana and Elitsa maybe would contribute, Logistics companies – Gary, Customs – Kjetil, etc. This is only idea, of course, and I would appreciate you opinions this week here on Forum or please write to me info@lcpa.lt
Thank you.
Kind regards,
Enrika