December 9, 2025
How T57 Is Rewriting Trade Finance for Global
Agriculture
Agriculture
Across global trade, a $2.5 trillion financing gap locks out countless businesses from participating in commerce. The agriculture sector is among the hardest hit. Farmers, cooperatives, processors, and agri-SMEs struggle to secure the working capital they need to buy inputs, pay labor, move goods, and fulfil export contracts, even as the world produces enough food to feed everyone. The result is a paradox: food is grown, but often never reaches the people who need it most.
The hard truth is this: Small and mid-sized enterprises in trade face rejection rates of 40–45 percent for financing requests, compared with 7–11 percent for large corporations. In practice, this means most farmers cannot finance seeds and fertilizer, cooperatives cannot access the letters of credit needed for exports, and value-adding processors remain stuck in low-investment cycles. At the same time, post-harvest losses and food waste together account for roughly $1 trillion in economic damage annually and contribute 8–10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. While agriculture feels the trade finance gap more sharply than most industries, everyone—you and I—pays for it in terms of a lack of nutrition and the growing threat of climate change.
The traditional system is simply not built for most farmers and rural realities. Paper-based trade documentation still dominates, with billions of pages circulating annually in the global trade ecosystem. A single cross-border shipment can take 15 days or more to have documents verified and processed, locking up working capital while produce waits in warehouses or at ports.
Simple business economics is behind this problem: For banks, the fixed costs of compliance and documentation make a $50,000 transaction for a farmer almost as expensive to process as a $5 million one for a large corporate client. The bank will, obviously, prioritize the corporate client and not the farming and agricultural community.
T57 addresses these barriers by replacing analog friction with a digital, AI-native infrastructure purpose-built for food and agriculture. At its core, T57 is a unified platform that brings together farmers, cooperatives, traders, logistics providers, certifiers, banks, investors, and governments into a single, trusted digital corridor. Instead of scattered systems and isolated pilots, T57 connects production, trade, finance, and compliance into one ecosystem designed for inclusion and transparency.
Blockchain technology underpins traceability in this model. Every movement of produce—from farm to storage, processing, transport, and sale—can be logged as a tamper-proof record. This gives insurers and financiers verifiable data to price risk more accurately. The same infrastructure supports food security tokens across multiple countries, enabling new instruments for inclusive financing within the agri-food system.
Artificial intelligence adds the intelligence layer that traditional platforms lack. AI models analyze transaction histories and KYB/KYC data of sellers and buyers to lower compliance costs, helping banks and investors serve agri clients at scale. The combination of data and intelligence turns compliance from a cost center into a strategic enabler for trade finance in agriculture.
On the finance side, T57 embeds multiple instruments directly into the trade flow. Flexible banking products, near-instant letters of credit, and smart-contract-based settlement are integrated into the platform, using digital assets and stablecoins to shorten settlement times from days to minutes. Gold-backed stablecoins and hedging tools help protect farmers and agribusinesses from cross-border frictions and price volatility, risks that have historically kept many financial institutions away from smaller agricultural clients.
Beyond technology, T57 is designed as a complete ecosystem. It works with farmer enablement centers, value-added processing hubs, distribution networks, and cooperatives to strengthen every stage of the farm-to-fork lifecycle. Contract farming frameworks provide farmers with predictable prices and offtake. At the same time, carbon credit programs reward climate-smart practices and create additional revenue streams that can be financed and traded on the platform. For trade finance, this means more bankable projects, stronger collateral, and a deeper pipeline of investable agricultural opportunities.
The lesson from T57 is clear: solving trade finance for agriculture is not just about lending more money; it is about redesigning the system that moves money, goods, and information. By unifying digital documentation, programmable payments, AI-powered compliance, and inclusive financial products on a single platform, T57 offers a blueprint for how the world can narrow the trade finance gap while building resilient, food-secure economies.
Note: The author was invited to the Saudi Trade Finance Summit in Riyadh in November 2025, where he delivered the keynote address. This article is adapted from his keynote address.
The hard truth is this: Small and mid-sized enterprises in trade face rejection rates of 40–45 percent for financing requests, compared with 7–11 percent for large corporations. In practice, this means most farmers cannot finance seeds and fertilizer, cooperatives cannot access the letters of credit needed for exports, and value-adding processors remain stuck in low-investment cycles. At the same time, post-harvest losses and food waste together account for roughly $1 trillion in economic damage annually and contribute 8–10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. While agriculture feels the trade finance gap more sharply than most industries, everyone—you and I—pays for it in terms of a lack of nutrition and the growing threat of climate change.
The traditional system is simply not built for most farmers and rural realities. Paper-based trade documentation still dominates, with billions of pages circulating annually in the global trade ecosystem. A single cross-border shipment can take 15 days or more to have documents verified and processed, locking up working capital while produce waits in warehouses or at ports.
Simple business economics is behind this problem: For banks, the fixed costs of compliance and documentation make a $50,000 transaction for a farmer almost as expensive to process as a $5 million one for a large corporate client. The bank will, obviously, prioritize the corporate client and not the farming and agricultural community.
T57 addresses these barriers by replacing analog friction with a digital, AI-native infrastructure purpose-built for food and agriculture. At its core, T57 is a unified platform that brings together farmers, cooperatives, traders, logistics providers, certifiers, banks, investors, and governments into a single, trusted digital corridor. Instead of scattered systems and isolated pilots, T57 connects production, trade, finance, and compliance into one ecosystem designed for inclusion and transparency.
Blockchain technology underpins traceability in this model. Every movement of produce—from farm to storage, processing, transport, and sale—can be logged as a tamper-proof record. This gives insurers and financiers verifiable data to price risk more accurately. The same infrastructure supports food security tokens across multiple countries, enabling new instruments for inclusive financing within the agri-food system.
Artificial intelligence adds the intelligence layer that traditional platforms lack. AI models analyze transaction histories and KYB/KYC data of sellers and buyers to lower compliance costs, helping banks and investors serve agri clients at scale. The combination of data and intelligence turns compliance from a cost center into a strategic enabler for trade finance in agriculture.
On the finance side, T57 embeds multiple instruments directly into the trade flow. Flexible banking products, near-instant letters of credit, and smart-contract-based settlement are integrated into the platform, using digital assets and stablecoins to shorten settlement times from days to minutes. Gold-backed stablecoins and hedging tools help protect farmers and agribusinesses from cross-border frictions and price volatility, risks that have historically kept many financial institutions away from smaller agricultural clients.
Beyond technology, T57 is designed as a complete ecosystem. It works with farmer enablement centers, value-added processing hubs, distribution networks, and cooperatives to strengthen every stage of the farm-to-fork lifecycle. Contract farming frameworks provide farmers with predictable prices and offtake. At the same time, carbon credit programs reward climate-smart practices and create additional revenue streams that can be financed and traded on the platform. For trade finance, this means more bankable projects, stronger collateral, and a deeper pipeline of investable agricultural opportunities.
The lesson from T57 is clear: solving trade finance for agriculture is not just about lending more money; it is about redesigning the system that moves money, goods, and information. By unifying digital documentation, programmable payments, AI-powered compliance, and inclusive financial products on a single platform, T57 offers a blueprint for how the world can narrow the trade finance gap while building resilient, food-secure economies.
Note: The author was invited to the Saudi Trade Finance Summit in Riyadh in November 2025, where he delivered the keynote address. This article is adapted from his keynote address.
