Intermediation Is Dead, Long Live Transport Intelligence!
The transport sector is entering a new era. Long organized around intermediaries, it is set to experience a historic break in the coming years: new information technologies now make it possible to connect supply and demand directly. Thanks to digitalization and real-time tracking tools, companies can now aspire to manage their transport operations in a direct, transparent, and autonomous way.
Transport: a distinct function
Yet transport remains, by its very nature, a distinct economic function. It “belongs to no one.”
It is the only economic function that connects different actors without ever being part of their core business.
Neither the shipper nor the consignee is meant to make it their profession. From this uniqueness arises the emergence of a market for expertise, intended to be operated by “trusted third-party” companies capable of ensuring consistency, neutrality, and performance between shippers, carriers, and consignees. This role of independent expert—guarantor of the performance of transport operations between different economic worlds—becomes all the more essential in a context of accelerated disintermediation.
The transport market: an irreversible structural transformation
This shift marks the end of the intermediation model that is the core business of very large historical operators, most of them multinationals. Their activity consists of buying transport capacity to resell it to their customers, and their objective is therefore naturally to maximize margins.
Intelligence: the new horizon of the transport function for shippers
By contrast, turning to an expert trusted third party allows shippers to rely on a provider whose goal is to ensure the efficient use of transport budgets. Digital platforms, often presented as the ultimate solution, remain to date mere passive tools: they facilitate connections but do not replace strategic thinking, the governance required for a well-controlled supply chain, or a commitment to results. The abundance of data enables independent expert managers to demonstrate the level of performance of the budgets entrusted to them, both in terms of operational efficiency and pricing. The performance indicators derived from this data finally give shipper clients the ability to understand a function that lies outside their core business. We are therefore quite literally entering an era of intelligence in the transport function—intelligence being defined, etymologically, as the capacity to understand.
The transport sector is thus not undergoing an evolution, but a structural rupture.
By Jean Marie Mascarenhas Founding President of Interlog Group
