Online dispute resolution likely to become a godsend for SMEs, with Hong Kong at its heart
3-5pc of all international transactions end in dispute. E-commerce alone saw over 820 million disputes last year, with 35pc never resolved. Small firms in many cases read the numbers, and retire in horror to lick their (sometimes fatal) wounds.
At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, you know something is becoming important when officials generate an acronym for it.
So in Ho Chi Minh City a month ago, when the APEC Economic Committee decided to spend a day on something called “ODR”, I knew a big new initiative was afoot. The first challenge then was to discover what the acronym stood for without looking too stupid.
The usually infallible Wikipedia lays a fascinating array of false trails – the Oregon Department of Revenue, the Office of Disability Rights, the One-definition rule, Optical Diffraction Radiation, the Output Data Rate. Eventually, I stubbed my toe on the answer: Online Dispute Resolution.
If that all sounds dry as a bone, then the sound is misleading.
As soon as I discovered what it meant, I realised that the forum for 21 Pacific Rim member economies that promotes free trade throughout the Asia-Pacific region’s Economic Committee was right to be getting excited. And so should Asia’s businesses.
For four years now, business leaders gathering in the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) have become increasingly animated by the need to help small companies get involved in cross-border trade and investment.