Chaos at the border

Following Brexit, Covid-19 and shifting trends in e-commerce, managing the flow of international goods is becoming increasingly demanding and complex. The rapid growth of freight to local fulfilment centres for global sales platforms including Amazon and AliExpress exacerbates this. Across the fragmented global logistics industry, customs processing costs are spiralling, and delays are becoming endemic. Trading companies, customs brokers, and freight forwarders urgently need solutions which increase efficiencies and solve the bottlenecks in their customs processes. Core bottlenecks stem from a continuing disconnect between national and international package coding and a lack of digitisation for data-analysis. Data is difficult to obtain and to structure, limiting competitor solution capability.

Isn't it great when the market requires you to build a solution?

In late 2020 a customs broker reached out to Julio and Oscar to explain his operational problems. With their mix of experience from the worlds of international trade and data science they began a project to build a solution and thus Sifty ML (Machine Learning) was born.

Oscar Morales, CEO of Sifty commented “The market opportunity is enormous: the logistics industry handles >£13.5 trillion in goods annually; with UK cargo imports >£500 billion (25% with the EU). International incoming parcels create £3.8 billion revenues for courier companies, but margins are tight with growing bottlenecks requiring costly staff time to resolve.”In 2022 Sifty got involved with Innovate UK, the UK’s national innovation agency, and successfully won an award validating product market fit and a grant to develop this critical solution for UK and international trade. SiftyML aims to disrupt the current logistics tech status quo unleashing advanced machine learning on its growing proprietary dataset of real-time customs information. The goal is to predict, assess and increase the efficiency of goods moving across borders, radically reducing processing times by 80%.

SiftyML’s algorithms can enable processing of the 95% of straightforward parcels with minimal human effort, allowing experienced customs officials to concentrate on the 5% of complex parcels, supported by SiftyML’s automation and insights.

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“This project will enhance our existing offering with new advanced algorithms to drive efficiency savings by more than 95% for the processing of all goods crossing borders. The project will enable our expansion into the UK and Spanish markets; Current partners include Royal Mail in the UK and Cacesa in Ireland and Spain.”

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Oscar Morales, Sifty