The rising tide of confidence rolling across the dry bulk sector has prompted welcome questions of how the business can radically update its antiquated trading processes.

Everywhere you turn in business outside shipping today, you hear frenzied anticipation of how the emerging digitalised world will radically overhaul all business practices. But in shipping that process has only just begun.

As Citigroup’s Michael Parker wryly remarked at the TradeWinds Shipowners Forum in Singapore this week, shipping has finally embarked on a voyage from the structures and processes of the 19th century to those of the 21st.