Global companies are still reshaping their supply chains. Increasingly, the work is happening inside existing networks, through supplier relationships, inventory strategy and the financial capabilities needed to keep them moving.

Standard Chartered’s Future of Trade 2026 report, titled ‘Navigating an age of structural uncertainty’, finds that 95% of corporates expect to adjust supply chain activity over the next three to five years. Yet across sourcing, manufacturing and exporting, almost 60% expect neither to enter new markets nor exit existing ones. Geographic reconfiguration is losing priority, while supplier strategies and inventory management are moving up the agenda. 

The balance of action has shifted. Supplier-focused strategies have risen 4.3 percentage points in priority compared with the past year, while inventory management is up 2.9 points. Geographic reconfiguration, including regionalisation, nearshoring and diversification beyond China, is down 7.2 points. 

Roberto Hoornweg, chief executive officer of Corporate & Investment Banking at Standard Chartered, writes in the report’s foreword: “One of the clearest messages from this report is that competitive advantage is becoming capability-led rather than location-led.” 

Based on 2,100 C-suite executives and senior trade finance decision-makers from multinational companies with annual revenues above US$250m across 27 markets and five sectors, Oxford Economics conducted the survey in June and July 2026. It is paired with modelling that tests how deeper geopolitical fragmentation or faster digitalisation could reshape trade through 2031.

Resilience without relocation

In the first half of 2026, tariffs accounted for 4.6% of restrictive trade measures, down from 8.9% in 2025, but the policy environment has hardly become simpler. Sanctions, export controls, investment screening, subsidies, procurement preferences and other geo-economic measures increasingly reach companies beyond the markets directly involved in a dispute. Measures restricting services trade were around 57% higher in the first half of 2026 than a year earlier. 

In ASEAN, the share of respondents ranking geo-economic actions among their top three trade concerns rises from 49% over the past year to 57% over the next three to five years. In the Middle East and Africa, it rises from 47% to 51%. 

As geo-economic risk spreads across regions, moving activity offers less insulation. Supplier-focused strategies have risen 8.7 percentage points in the Americas and 6.8 points in Greater China and North Asia. Inventory management gains 8.4 points in ASEAN and 6.7 points in the Middle East and Africa, where recent energy disruption has encouraged larger safety stocks. 

Sector detail reinforces the pattern. Consumer-facing businesses reduce the priority given to geographic reconfiguration by 7.9 percentage points while lifting supplier-focused strategies by 5.2 points. Energy companies record an 8.6-point drop in geographic reconfiguration and a 4.5-point rise in inventory management. 

Companies are still making selective geographic bets. India leads the survey’s net intention scores for sourcing, manufacturing and exports, while the Australia-India corridor shows the strongest sourcing momentum and Malaysia-US the strongest export intentions. UK businesses also report rising planned export activity into India, Indonesia and Japan.

Nearly every company expects that adjustment to cost money. Some 65% expect supply chain reconfiguration to increase trading costs by at least 10% over the next three to five years. Within that group, 24% expect a 15% to 19% increase, and 11% expect costs to rise by at least 20%. 

Financial cost is closely followed by capability gaps. Transition and relocation expenses are cited by 32% as a leading barrier, while 29% point to limited insight into optimal treasury management. Lack of advanced analytical capabilities and shortages of internal expertise are each cited by 28%, while 27% point to trade-policy uncertainty. 

Changing a supplier can alter payment terms, inventory requirements and currency exposure before any production line moves. Holding more safety stock ties up cash; adding suppliers creates new financing and payment relationships. The financial consequences of reconfiguration therefore begin well before a company changes its geographic footprint.

Treasury moves into the trade decision

Over the next three to five years, 37% of corporates plan to integrate treasury and supply chain functions more closely, while another 37% expect to adjust treasury strategy in response to structural uncertainty. Among companies reshaping treasury, 57% rank currency risk management among their leading priorities and one-third expect their FX exposure to increase. 

Currency exposure is also broadening. The US dollar remains dominant, accounting for around 60% of trade invoices in the Middle East and Africa and 59% in the Americas. Renminbi use is expected to grow, however, with 41% of respondents anticipating an increase in its use in trade invoices and contracts over the next three to five years, against 11% expecting a decline. In Australia and the Pacific, 52% expect renminbi use to rise. 

Visibility remains patchy. Although 83% of corporates report some integration between treasury and supply chain, only 10% describe that integration as complete. Another 43% are partially integrated, while 30% report limited integration and 17% remain in silos. 

Limited end-to-end visibility across supply chain and financial flows is the largest integration gap, cited by 34%. Misalignment between procurement and treasury comes next at 20%, followed by an inability to fund supply chain changes quickly at 18%. 

Among companies still operating in silos or with limited integration, 39% plan to prioritise closer treasury and supply chain integration, compared with 25% of other businesses. 

Seeing a disruption’s cash impact earlier can change the response. A supplier delay can alter inventory requirements, customer delivery, receivables and funding needs at the same time. A sourcing change can introduce a new currency exposure before the first invoice is issued. A trade restriction can change both margin and liquidity assumptions before it appears in period-end reporting.

For Gaurav Jain, global head of banking and treasury at ABG Trading, that has changed the treasury brief itself: “The entire game has completely changed as far as my role is concerned - from managing cash to managing uncertainty.” 

Scenario planning hits an execution gap

Among corporates that consider scenario tools relevant, 82% have begun using them in some form. Only 16% report mature implementation; however, 33% are in early implementation, 33% are still at the pilot or experimental stage, and 18% have yet to begin. 

Frequency varies too. Some 41% review scenarios quarterly and 28% weekly or monthly, while 31% remain ad hoc. More revealing is what happens after the model is run: 54% use scenario outputs to build risk awareness, but only 41% use them for business decisions and 38% for treasury actions. 

Tariffs are the most frequently modelled risk, included by 58% of scenario users. Geo-economic actions such as sanctions and export controls follow at 44%, then non-tariff measures and regulatory change at 41%, commodity and energy-price volatility at 40%, demand shocks at 38% and currency volatility at 37%. 

Those risks rarely arrive separately. A tariff can raise input costs while an exchange-rate move amplifies the effect, an energy shock changes production economics, and an export control restricts access to a supplier or market. Treasury then has to assess the combined impact on margin, working capital, liquidity and hedging rather than a single line in a risk register.

Capacity appears to be one reason scenario planning stalls before action. Standard Chartered points to uneven modelling skills, inconsistent data across suppliers and entities and the analyst time required to keep scenarios current as conditions change. 

Jain says his team has increased the frequency accordingly: “We do scenario planning every week, sometimes every day.” The objective is not confined to avoiding losses. Elsewhere in his comments, he says: “Risk management strategy actually became a growth strategy for us.” 

The gap, then, is between identifying disruption and putting numbers against the response. Treasury needs to know when a change in cost, cash, funding or customer service reaches a threshold that requires action, and who owns that decision.

Digital gains have yet to scale

Some 83% of respondents say digital tools allow their organisation to respond more quickly to supply chain disruption, while 82% say they improve decision-making through better visibility and forecasting across financial and supply chain flows. Almost three-quarters (74%) agree that digital treasury capabilities improve resilience in managing cash, liquidity and FX exposure during periods of uncertainty. 

Four in five corporates report measurable gains from at least one of the 10 digital capabilities examined in the survey. That falls to 40% reporting gains from at least three and just 7% from five or more. 

Even established technologies have considerable room to scale. Automated payments and collections, the most mature capability measured, are fully implemented in 37% of corporates. Digital trade document management stands at 21%, while scenario modelling is at 16%. Stablecoins and other digital currencies reach 10%, and tokenisation and distributed ledger technology 8%. 

Standard Chartered classifies businesses scoring above the survey median for both implementation maturity and realised benefits as ‘digital leaders’. Among that group, 79% say digitalisation improves their ability to manage cash, liquidity and FX risk, compared with 71% of laggards. Leaders are also more likely to say technology helps them respond quickly to supply chain disruption, at 87% versus 81%. 

Almost 90% of digital leaders use scenario modelling in some capacity, with 30% doing so weekly or monthly compared with 19% of laggards. Some 76% model at least three scenarios and 24% examine five or more simultaneously. 

AI becomes more useful once finance and operational data can be interrogated together. Linda Wang, senior finance director at Adidas Sourcing Limited, says: “We have a very good internal database, and we have applied AI agents and chatbots on top of these databases, allowing us to generate insights very quickly and reducing the need for people to carry out extensive manual work.” 

Corporate expectations for AI are running well ahead of transformational adoption. Some 56% regard AI and advanced analytics as highly relevant or transformational to advancing trade digitalisation, behind cloud infrastructure and data integration at 70%. Yet only 14% describe AI as transformational, the lowest proportion among the technologies assessed. 

International commerce is also becoming more digital. Digitally delivered services exports grew 136% between 2016 and 2025, compared with 70% growth in total goods and services exports, and reached 14.7% of total exports from 10.6%. That expansion raises the value of connected data, digital payments and compliance processes for companies selling services across borders. 

Digital savings offset part of the reconfiguration bill

Corporates expect reconfiguration to increase overall trading costs by around 13% over the next three to five years. At the same time, they expect digitalisation to reduce costs by roughly one-fifth across several stages of cross-border trade. 

Expected savings range from 19% for meeting compliance and regulatory requirements to around 21% for trade-document processing, shipment coordination and identifying overseas counterparties. Payments and settlement carry the largest expected reduction at almost 22%. 

Reconfiguration costs arise as companies add suppliers, hold more stock, change production or build redundancy. Digital savings can accumulate across processes that touch the same transaction repeatedly, from onboarding and documentation to logistics, compliance and settlement.

Some 63% expect digitalisation to cut the cost of identifying and engaging overseas counterparties by at least 20%. That matters as companies deepen supplier networks without necessarily abandoning existing markets. More suppliers can improve resilience, but every additional relationship creates onboarding, payment, compliance and data requirements. 

Higher inventories can protect production but trap cash. More sourcing markets can reduce concentration but multiply currencies, accounts and payment routes. Treasury therefore needs to see where additional resilience is consuming cash. Larger inventories, additional suppliers and more payment routes do not carry the same funding requirement, and treating them alike risks tying up liquidity unnecessarily.

Interoperability becomes the bottleneck

Interoperability with external systems is the single most commonly cited barrier to digitalisation, selected by 50% of respondents. Inside companies, 45% point to a lack of expertise and capabilities, 43% to legacy systems that are difficult to upgrade, 41% to high cost or unclear return on investment and 38% to fragmented data across functions. 

Internal issues account for 56% of ranked barriers, against 44% attributed to the wider trading environment. Companies waiting for industry standards to mature still have substantial work to do inside their own finance and operating architecture. 

A digital trade document has limited value if a supplier, bank or authority cannot accept it. Real-time cash information is less useful if operational systems cannot connect it to inventory, procurement or customer data. Tokenised settlement cannot reach scale if every participant sits on a separate network.

Some 83% agree that banks, digital intermediaries and logistics providers can help accelerate digitalisation. Regulatory alignment remains another constraint. Among corporates facing regulatory barriers, 49% cite data protection or localisation requirements, 40% note inconsistent regulations and standards and 39% highlight cybersecurity compliance burdens. 

Supplier finance shows how regulation can alter financing behaviour. Some 25% say enhanced accounting disclosure requirements have materially curtailed their use of supplier finance programmes, whether by slowing adoption, reducing participation or prompting exits. It is a reminder that transparency requirements can change the economics and attractiveness of tools intended to support liquidity. 

Scenarios that put numbers on the stakes

Standard Chartered and Oxford Economics use two scenarios to show what could be at stake if today’s pressures become more pronounced. The scenarios are illustrative, not forecasts. Their value for finance teams lies in the scale of the variables they expose, from trade volumes and producer prices to exchange rates. 

Under the Geopolitical Fragmentation scenario, intensifying trade frictions, energy disruption and slower cross-border flows of technology, knowledge, capital and talent could leave global trade around US$3.8 trillion below the August 2026 baseline by 2031, roughly 9% lower. 

World GDP continues to grow in that scenario, averaging 2.2% annually in 2027 and 2028 before accelerating to 3.3% from 2029 to 2031. Companies would therefore face slower growth, shifting trade corridors and higher costs while markets continued to expand. 

Producer prices would average 6.2% above baseline globally, with the Americas 8.7% higher and ASEAN 6.8% higher. Currency movements could range from a 15.6% depreciation in the Middle East and Africa to a 9.9% appreciation in Australia and Asia Pacific against the US dollar. 

Moves of that scale could alter sourcing economics, margins, hedge requirements and the location of cash, reinforcing why 57% of companies changing treasury strategy put currency risk among their leading priorities.

Under the Digital Acceleration scenario, lower trade frictions, stronger technology investment, and faster AI adoption could lift global trade 6.9% above baseline by 2031, equivalent to US$2.8 trillion in additional annual trade. 

Services stand to gain most, rising 11.4% above baseline compared with 5.9% for goods. Regional gains also vary, from 3.6% above baseline in Europe to 9.4% in the Americas, 8.9% in Greater China and North Asia and 7.4% in ASEAN. 

Treasury may have to prepare for both conditions at once. Fragmentation would put pressure on costs, currencies and liquidity, while faster digitalisation could open trade corridors more quickly than existing finance processes can support. Scenario planning becomes useful when it shows what each outcome would require from cash, hedging, funding and capital allocation.

Every supplier change, inventory build, or move into a new trade corridor eventually reaches treasury. Each can alter the timing and location of cash, introduce currency exposure or create a funding requirement. The advantage comes from seeing those consequences while the business still has choices, rather than after the operational decision is already in motion.