Written by Amy Morgan, VP Trade Compliance at Altana
Ever walk up to a concert or a game with your ticket ready on your phone? Or scan your fob to get into the office? We don’t think twice about using digital passes in daily life. They’re simple, fast, and secure. They verify who we are, maintain a safe environment, and move millions of people to their destinations without a hitch.
But in global trade, we’ve never had anything like it. For decades, supply chains have been a fragmented web of opaque relationships. With trade wars, forced labor laws, and rising geopolitical tensions, regulators, companies, and even consumers are all asking the same questions: What exactly is this product? How was it made, and where did it come from?
Until recently, regulators never asked for component-level visibility, so most companies never built a way to provide it. Now that the demand is here, we need a trusted, digital way to collect and share that detail. What if every shipment carried its own fast pass at the border, the same way your ticket gets you into a concert? That’s the idea behind Product Passports.
That’s what makes the US Customs and Border Protection’s recent announcement so significant. In partnership with the Global Business Identifier (GBI) pilot, CBP has adopted Altana Product Passports as a new way to validate goods before they reach the border. It’s a simple idea with transformational potential: a digital passport for a product that carries only the essential information needed for clearance.
From Black Boxes to Transparency
Today, proving compliance often means scrambling through spreadsheets, supplier surveys, and scattered documents. Anyone who’s handled a CF-28 or scrambled to respond to a UFLPA detention knows the drill: inconsistent affidavits, brokers chasing missing paperwork, and midnight fire drills when shipments are held up.
In other words, we’re trying to trace a product’s origin and inputs, but traceability has traditionally been a manual, one-off exercise. Importers send surveys, suppliers scramble to respond, and regulators end up with inconsistent snapshots. The result is reactive, costly, and quickly out of date.
Product Passports flip that script. Instead of opaque supply chains where regulators are forced to make enforcement decisions with incomplete information (and importers are left reacting after the fact), Product Passports provide a common, digital record of a product’s identity and provenance. And, crucially, they’re flexible: the information shared with a customer, a regulator, or a business partner can be tailored to what’s relevant in that context.
Just like a boarding pass pulls from a trusted record of your identity, Product Passports pull from a product network enriched with details like HS code, origin, and supplier relationships. But just like you don’t need to share your mother’s maiden name to get into a baseball game, you don’t need to share every detail about a product to clear the border. The Product Passport lets you share only what’s needed.
Why AI is Essential
Moving from manual, one-off traceability to continuous, shareable Product Passports isn’t possible with spreadsheets. Supply chains are too vast, too dynamic, and too fragmented. That’s why AI is essential.
AI takes all our messy, scattered trade data (bills of materials, supplier names, shipment records) and continuously structures it into a product network. It suggests connections across tiers, flags risks, and creates a common model that partners can trust. Instead of compliance checks that are frozen in time, AI keeps the information alive and up to date, turning static compliance checks into living intelligence. This means partners work together to verify product information, without endless back-and-forth.
The lightbulb moment here is realizing: it isn’t about collecting more data. It’s about structuring the messy data you already have into something living and usable.
This is what allows Product Passports to work at scale: a system that adapts as products and supplier networks change daily.
The Network Effect
Once AI organizes and verifies product data, the real power emerges when we start connecting it across our networks. Importers can request and link Product Passports from their suppliers, creating a verifiable picture of how a product was made from raw materials to final assembly, documented by the manufacturers themselves.
For regulators, that means enforcement decisions are based on reliable, up-to-date information instead of partial snapshots. For importers, it means fewer detentions, fewer firefights, and more time to focus on strategic compliance.
This is the shift from survey-based traceability that lags behind reality to a collaborative, real-time network where compliance information moves in step with trade itself. For the first time, a regulator and an importer can look at the same Product Passport and see the same facts. That’s new.
Regulators and companies ultimately want the same outcomes: to protect national security, ensure products are ethically sourced, and keep trade efficient. Yet many trusted importers are frustrated by the complexity. The lack of a shared standard for compliance documentation too often leads to delays and costly detentions. That’s what makes CBP’s pilot with Altana so significant: it offers the shared standard both regulators and industry have been waiting for.
Proof in Practice
This isn’t a theory. CBP is already piloting Product Passports as part of its Trade Modernization agenda. Trusted importers are submitting Passport IDs with their entries today, giving regulators proof of compliance upfront. The result? Shipments that once triggered detentions are clearing without incident. For regulators, it’s proactive validation. For businesses, it’s fewer surprises, lower costs, and a faster lane at the border.
Why GBI Matters
In the pilot, the GBI serves as the carrier for the Product Passport ID so the product-level identifier travels with the entry. Said simply: the passport is the product’s fast pass; the GBI field is the vehicle for communicating it. Using the GBI this way lets CBP and trusted traders link a product’s verified passport to the entry data already being filed, without inventing a new filing lane.
The Global Business Identifier initiative is CBP’s effort to move beyond outdated company ID systems and toward more precise, reliable identifiers. Pairing GBI with Product Passports creates the foundation for a new era of compliance: company identity and product identity, both verified and linked.
This alignment matters. National security and ethical sourcing demands are rising, but so is the need to keep commerce flowing. With GBI and Product Passports, those goals aren’t at odds. They’re working together.
This is the moment when compliance stops being a bottleneck and becomes a fast lane.
What This Means for Trade Professionals
For compliance teams, this means fewer firefights. Participants in the pilot are already seeing smoother clearances and more predictable outcomes. Regulators gain confidence through proactive verification; companies regain time and attention for strategy instead of paperwork. For the first time, compliance managers can stop playing defense and start shaping strategy.Looking Ahead
Every era of trade has had its defining infrastructure: the shipping container, electronic entry, the single window. Product Passports may well be this era’s defining infrastructure, strengthening both security and trade.
