On 4 November, GTR reported that the International Trade and Forfaiting Association (ITFA) has asked the European Commission and member states to consider a common register for receivables that have been sold or pledged. Parties would “record limited, time-stamped information that an identified receivable or portfolio has been assigned, purchased or pledged”, and could check whether someone got there first. The work is led by Christian Hausherr of Deutsche Bank and Silja Calac of Banco Santander; GTR reports the group is looking at technologies such as tokenisation to build it (GTR, 4 November 2026; ITFA).
It is a good idea, and overdue. Hausherr puts the risk plainly: the receivable you buy “may be theoretically double assigned or pledged by someone else”. A shared, time-stamped list would make that much harder.
A register answers one question well: has anyone already claimed this invoice? It cannot answer the question underneath it. Did the goods behind the invoice ever move?
Everyone has bought something that was already sold.
The double-booked holiday flat. The concert ticket that two people turn up with. The second-hand car that still carries the previous owner’s loan, which is why many countries let buyers check a register of outstanding car finance before they pay.
In each case the fix is a list: one record per thing, first claim wins. Lists work when the thing itself is easy to see. A flat has an address. A car has a chassis number. You can stand in front of it.
An invoice is different. It is a promise that a buyer owes money because goods were delivered. You cannot stand in front of it. The only way to see what it stands for is to see the shipment.
Trade finance learned this the expensive way.
When First Brands, a US auto-parts group, filed for Chapter 11 in Texas in September 2025, its restructuring officer told the court that receivables may have been “factored more than once”; GTR reported factoring liabilities of US$2.3bn (GTR, 30 September 2025). In January 2026, US prosecutors charged the founder and his brother; according to GTR, the indictment alleges fabricated invoices and inventory pledged multiple times. Both are allegations, and the founder denies the charges (GTR, 30 January 2026).
Two different failures sit inside that story, and they need two different checks.
The same invoice, financed twice
A real invoice is sold to two financers. Each one sees a valid document; neither sees the other. This is exactly what a register solves.
An invoice with no shipment behind it
A fabricated invoice is registered once, cleanly, first in line. The register shows nothing wrong, because there is nothing to clash with. The record is perfect. The goods do not exist.
Collateral that moves twice
Inventory pledged to two lenders is the physical version of the same gap. Paper says one thing; the warehouse says another; nobody compares them in time.
A list of claims is not proof of goods.
ITFA is careful here. Its register “would initially be informational”, not a way to decide “ownership, legal validity, enforcement or priority”. That honesty is the right starting point. It also tells us where the remaining risk lives: in the link between the financial record and the physical event.
In a cross-border sale, that event is not hidden. A container is gated in at the port. A vessel loads. A carrier issues a bill of lading. Each of these leaves a record, created by someone other than the seller.
The useful detail: the bill of lading is already in scope.
GTR notes that ITFA’s register could also cover promissory notes and bills of lading. That is the most interesting line in the proposal. If the transport document sits in the same register as the invoice it supports, a financer could ask both questions at once: is this claim first, and is there a shipment under it?
From the operator side, the friction is familiar. A trade finance team usually sees the invoice weeks before it sees the shipping documents, and checks them against each other by hand, if at all. The invoice travels by email; the bill of lading travels by courier or on a separate platform. The gap between them is where a fabricated invoice can live for months.
Faster registers move the same blind spot faster.
Tokenising the register will make claims instant and tamper-evident. That is real progress. But a token that records “invoice 4471 was pledged to Bank A at 10:02” is still a statement about paper. Speed and immutability raise confidence in the record; they do not, on their own, raise confidence in the goods.
The next step is to bind the financial claim to events that a third party produced: loading, departure, arrival, release.
This is the layer we are building.
At STANDAGE, Digitrad Payments ties payment to recorded shipment events rather than to documents a single party can issue. The same idea applies to financing: money moves when the shipment record says it can, and the record is written by the people who actually handle the goods. A register of who claimed what, joined to a record of what actually moved, would close both gaps in the First Brands story.
The litmus test
Pick one financed invoice from last month. Without asking the seller, can you point to the shipment record behind it: who loaded it, when, and on what vessel? If the answer takes more than a few minutes, your register of claims is ahead of your view of the goods.
For those working on receivables, eB/L or trade settlement: should a European receivables register record the shipment event too, or stay a clean list of claims and leave the goods to someone else?
