In the last few years, Asia has been hit by the worst world economic downturn in decades. Many of the countries are still attempting to revive their economies and boost the commercial sectors. In particular, the advent of technology has enabled many Asian countries and economies to move forward and link up with those in the West to increase their global trade.

One of the main challenges faced by the government and private sectors in these countries is the ability to develop a low-cost, secure and robust electronic infrastructure that can promote cross-border electronic trading transactions. This is further complicated by the different message types, protocols and messaging mechanisms that have resulted in many disparate Web-enabled solutions that differ in terms of messaging, security and business collaboration protocols. Differences in the legal framework of each country also contribute to the complexity of having cross-border legal transactions.

In this paper, we attempt to share our experience in conceptualising, designing and implementing a cross-border trade facilitation solution using ebXML as a ubiquitous platform to connect different custom broker agencies in Asia Pacific together.

The security and document exchange framework and specifications used to enable a modular electronic business infrastructure to facilitate global electronic cross-border trade will be illustrated in details. It also includes the methodology and processes used to overcome interoperability issues.

In particular, the paper will explain the key concepts used in the establishment of the legal framework based on the public key infrastructure (PKI) and Electronic Business Extensible Mark-up Language (ebXML) messaging platform, and how they are utilised by the Pan-Asian E-Commerce Alliance (PAA), a regional eCommerce alliance made up of seven IT solutions provider from different countries in Asia, to allow cross-recognition of certificates and the exchange of trade and logistics-related documents in a distributed setting of many service providers and certificate authorities, for electronic cross-border trading.

In the last part of the paper, the standards body for EDI and the developments of ebXML in Asia will also be covered.