Secro: Digital trade documents platform for maritime and commodities

Idiated by fintech operators and senior maritime attorneys, Secro set out to dismantle the document layer that quietly slows down billions of dollars of cargo and trade finance every year.

The platform serves 4 user segments at once: traders, importers and exporters; logistics service providers; financial institutions, insurance carriers and brokers; and technology providers that integrate with each of them. The product is engineered to drop into existing ERP, TMS and CMS landscapes, so that adoption inside a traditionally paper-heavy industry does not require any operator to learn the word “blockchain.”

S-PRO has been Secro’s engineering partner from the earliest prototype through to the live pilot now running with dry-bulk operators, commodity trading houses and thermal power producers. The team designed the solution architecture, built the underlying private-blockchain infrastructure, engineered the Specific Secro Gateway middleware that connects Secro to client systems, and delivered the full product across backend, frontend and quality.

Secro arrived with a clear product hypothesis but an open architecture question. The team knew the answer had to be more than another SaaS portal. For a maritime trader handing over a $50 million bill of lading, “trust us, it’s in our database” was never going to be enough. The new standard needed cryptographic finality to preserve its legal weight and guarantee reliability.

Document integrity and legal equivalence

A digital Bill of Lading is only useful if it carries the same legal weight as the paper original. The platform had to guarantee that each digital document was unique, transferable, tamper-evident and verifiable independently.

Adoption inside a traditional industry

Carriers, traders and banks operate on long-tenured workflows. The platform had to improve their existing process, not replace it.

Trade finance unlock

Finance providers had limited access to paper documents. The platform had to make these atomically transferable so pre-payment, factoring and instant-settlement workflows could be built on top.

Scale without compromising privacy

Hundreds of counterparties had to interact concurrently with full visibility for legitimate parties to each trade and zero visibility for everyone else.

We spent the first 6 weeks proving that hypothesis with a working prototype rather than a deck. Together with the Secro founding team we ran a focused discovery, mapped the document lifecycle across carriers, banks, traders and insurers, and validated the technical choices on real trade scenarios. By the end of week 8 we had a clickable prototype, a private blockchain backbone in place, and a 40-week MVP roadmap that everyone in the room could defend.

Frontend: React, optimized for desktop trading and operations environments

Backend: Node.js, with custom domain services for trade documents and counterparty workflows

Blockchain layer: Private permissioned blockchain network, full data encryption, cryptographic fingerprinting of every document

Middleware: Specific Secro Gateway for ERP, TMS and CMS integration

Security: Patented cybersecurity model, role-based access control, multi-factor authentication, complete audit trail

Infrastructure: Microsoft Azure cloud, with dedicated environments per major customer

Quality and observability: Continuous integration pipelines, automated regression suites, on-call monitoring

Solution Architect: Trade-flow design, blockchain topology

3 Backend Engineers: Blockchain, security, Node.js services

3 Frontend Engineers: React, complex trading UX

2 UX / UI Designers: Workflow design, counterparty engagement screens

Product Manager: Roadmap, customer feedback loops

Business Analyst: Trade document spec, legal equivalence

3 QA Automation: Manual QA and automated regression

DevOps Engineer: Azure infrastructure, CI/CD, observability

Experts across 8 disciplines. Many stayed 2 years or more. By handover, Secro’s internal hires were on-boarded, paired, and shipping – ready to own the product end-to-end.

The platform is now in production with a portfolio of reference customers across maritime, commodities and power generation.

Trust without centralisation

The platform replaces trust the counterparty and trust the bank with trust the protocol. Electronic bills of lading are transferable and verifiable. Letters of indemnity, traditionally issued to paper over missing original documents, are eliminated by default. Atomic swaps between document delivery and payment remove delivery risk on both sides of the transaction. Every party sees the same current state with full audit history, ending the parallel-spreadsheet problem that quietly drives most trade disputes.

Live with named industry references

Among the operators using Secro today are Oldendorff Carriers (one of the largest dry-bulk operators globally) and Odfjell (chemical tanker operator), alongside a major thermal power plant in South America, a fertilizer trading house and a soft-commodity trading house.

A faster, leaner trade flow backed by hard numbers

The platform replaces a sequence of paper handoffs with a single shared workflow. Documents that previously moved by courier or scan-and-email now move in real time across counterparties. Live deployments report:

Secro’s mission was to remove the paper bottleneck from global trade while leaving operators in full control of their existing systems. S-PRO delivered the architecture, the blockchain infrastructure, the integration middleware and the full product, then handed the keys over. The platform is now operated independently by Secro’s in-house engineering team and continues to run in production with named operators in maritime, commodities and power generation.

The patterns proven in Secro – cryptographic document fingerprinting, atomic title transfer, off-chain encrypted storage, middleware-led adoption – now form a reusable foundation S-PRO applies to adjacent trade flows: dry-bulk freight pooling, commodity trade finance and digital asset settlement.