Structured Freight Magazine Issue 01 / April 2017 | Page 6

Brexit and its Implications for UK companies

Brexit has been a hot topic of conversation, both in the media and in the pub. However, as the impact is so large, the discussion has been very general, and little is being said about the practical implications for UK businesses.

Once Brexit occurs, all trade between the UK and the EU will no longer be domestic trade, but international trade. And unfortunately, businesses in the UK are not familiar with the rules of international trade because they have been exempt for so long.

At Structured Freight, we specialise in international trade, and can explain some of the challenges you will need to expect. Legally, Brexit is the separation of the United Kingdom from the Treaty of Lisbon. Signed in December 2007, the Treaty of Lisbon unified the 1957 Treaty of Rome with the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht. The consolidation of these two landmark agreements created the European Union that we know today.

The Treaty of Rome was signed in March 1957 and took effect in January 1958. It gave rise to the European Economic Community and was initially signed by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany. Its purpose was to reduce customs taxes and establish a customs union that would be shared by all participating European nations. In this way, the Treaty of Rome was designed to create a common market for goods, services, labour, and capital.

In our globalised world, technology and communications are evolving faster than the freight industry is adapting.

We believe that we can harness this technology to transform and modernize the freight industry. The obstacles in our way are the disparate, outdated technologies currently in use by the freight industry and its reluctance to update its modes of operation.

Our goal is to create an interactive system powerful enough to automatically handle multimodal freight and flexible enough to support manual interaction when required.

This novel online tool will be useful in a wide range of markets and will be adaptable to many forms of communication, including online interfaces, APIs, and email.

CEO COLUMN