DFA Executive Roundtable 2025: Conference Summary
We were pleased to host the gathering of world leaders in the logistics and freight transportation industry on June 24, 2025, in Toronto, Canada, at the DFA Executive Roundtable 2025 together with CIFFA. Our team took away and brought back unforgettable impressions, valuable insights, and warm meetings with our beloved customers and partners.
Conference highlights
The most important thing was stated at the DFA Executive Roundtable 2025: businesses of all sizes can benefit greatly from modern technology.
And you shouldn't limit yourself, because real cases of using advanced ERP solutions and tools for expediting are impressive and facilitate both daily and sudden tasks:
- cargo booking management (air/sea/land),
- rate calculation,
- document generation (from bill of lading to invoices),
- automated reminders, statuses, and payment control
- and more
One of the insights is the fear of business barriers: “Will this tool fit into my business process?”, “What if it breaks?” and so on.
That's why we are happy to customize the tool to your needs, making our solutions modular, easy to implement, with language localization, and with a minimal “training curve.”
In addition, we discussed the huge growth in demand for “visibility as a service” among our valuable Alliance freight forwarders. Every logistics business needs an irreplaceable “second pair of eyes” to ultimately monitor and satisfy customer needs:
- unified tracking for parcel, sea, road, rail, and air cargo — all in a single interface
- predictive analytics
- real-time updates for customers instead of endless calls, “Where is my cargo?”
The Digital Freight Alliance also had the opportunity to emphasize the importance of partnerships as a strategy for freight forwarders to cooperate, jointly exchange data on services, promote tariffs, and together develop global markets.
Let's summarize the outcomes of our conference:
- Don't wait for the perfect moment — digitize in stages
- Look for systems that talk to each other through seamless integration
- Become part of the ecosystem, or it will bypass you
- The customer wants transparency — give it to them before they ask for it
Photos by Mariia Slabenko, Head of DFA, and Alona Malik, Head of Creative Department, at the DFA Executive Roundtable 2025 in Toronto, Canada, in June 2025.
Moreover, Mariia Slabenko shared her impressions of the conference speeches in her LinkedIn post. Learn more about the personal experience of the SeaRates and Digital Freight Alliance teams in the modern supply chain innovation world.
Future perspectives
Our team is pleased to note the success of the DFA Executive Roundtable 2025, which contributed to fruitful networking and your insights on rethinking the future of the freight forwarding business.
We are sincerely grateful for your participation and for sharing your needs, experiences, and discoveries with us. The DFA team is convinced that we are united in a community of those who are ready to build new logistics, not in theory, but in action.
The DFA Executive Roundtable 2025 in Toronto proved that when opinion leaders in freight forwarding come together, something more than just solutions is born — the community grows stronger!
We look forward to seeing you at our next event!
