Lesley Batchelor OBE: A great deal of changes in Incoterms
2020 - one of the biggest changes is how we're actually
laying them out and how we're explaining to people how to use
them. And there's lots more clarity on that. And that's
making a huge difference. So the way the booklets are laid out,
you can actually look under one set of terms to find out whose
responsibilities they are. But also, there's another set that
would tell you more about the documentation and how that what
that really means. So there's something broken down into the
modes, but there's also something broken down into what
we call the first A10, which is the the sellers responsibilities
and that starts off with the basic obligations and goes all
the way through to the costs and who pays what. And I think
that's a really useful way of doing it. The layman doesn't,
doesn't always understand what those implications are. And they
don't always understand where to use incoterms. I think that's a
really important part goes back to this thing. I often suggest
to people that if they're going to use incoterms, as part of
their contracts, that actually on their website under the terms
and conditions, there should be another page referring to
incoterms so that people have it absolutely clear under what
terms they're being quoted, because if you can get it
straight right at the very beginning, that's when you avoid
disputes later on. The major thing that's really changed
within incoterms is that we've now changed DAT, which is
Delivered the Terminal to DPU, which is Delivered Duty Paid,
Unloaded. And once you've got the unloaded issue there you are
actually in a different world altogether. And it's all about
the destination that you're talking about. So it might be
delivered only to one point but unloaded somewhere else. So it's
about making sure that there's a clarity there in everything that
we're trying to achieve.
Chris Southworth: Yeah, I mean, typically they go into a legal
contract. And I think it can be problematic. Companies
increasingly don't use contracts. And that's a problem.
So we are trying to help companies use the right
incoterms in whatever terms and conditions or heads of terms or
sort of light touch contracts. The ICC has a model contract,
which is a sort of a template for anyone in the world to use,
particularly for small companies. But in the UK, that
that's it's not uncommon for companies just to be trading on
invoices and, you know, paperwork that's not legally
binding binding, actually, it's quite surprising. So we've,
we've sort of partnered up with a company called Open Borders
Direct this year and launched a world first, that's an online
platform that allows companies to walk them through the process
and almost select the right incoterm for them, and allow
them to select whatever the sort of contract form they want
either their owns their own contract form, or terms and
conditions, heads of terms of whatever that might be, to try
and make it a bit easier for companies to understand what to
do. And also take the thinking away, you don't want to read a
book if you're a CEO or sales manager in an SME, you just want
to know what's the incoterm I should be using. And you don't
necessarily want to spend a lot of money on a lawyer. You know,
we should we need to make that a lot easier. So that's what we're
trying to do.