The spot market in an age of uncertainty: how digital platforms stabilize (or destabilize) road freight

We speak with Ewa Węgorkiewicz, Chief Commercial Officer and member of the Trans.eu Management Board, about why carriers are increasingly rejecting long-term contracts, how behavioral analytics eliminate blind market guessing, and how digital platforms are staying one step ahead of cybercriminals.

Market dynamics: navigating volatility with transparent data

Artur Lysionok, trans.iNFO editor, AI and Business Development Coordinator: The European road freight market has felt like a rollercoaster for quite some time now—skyrocketing operating costs, low cargo availability, and intense pressure on rates. In times of such volatility, is the spot market a lifeline for carriers, or has it become a brutal arena for sheer survival?

Honestly, it’s both, and I don’t think those two things are in contradiction. The European road freight sector is going through a structural shift that goes beyond the usual economic cycle — geopolitical instability, energy cost volatility, regulatory pressure, and fragmented supply chains have made long-term planning something many operators simply can’t afford anymore.

For carriers under unprecedented margin pressure, the spot market is a lifeline precisely because it lets them adjust rates to the reality of the moment, rather than being locked into a contract that doesn’t reflect current costs. 

But that same speed and openness that makes spot valuable is also its Achilles’ heel. It creates a window of exposure — to fraud, to bad actors — that closed markets and bilateral contracts simply don’t have. So yes, it’s survival, but it’s also opportunity. The real question the industry hasn’t put front and centre enough is: when the urgency to cover capacity takes over, how do you keep the certainty that you’re working with a trustworthy partner?

The spot market used to be primarily for securing backhauls and eliminating empty runs. Today, it’s a primary source of revenue for many companies. Are you seeing a structural shift in Trans.eu data—a move away from long-term contract logistics toward the flexibility offered by spot?

Absolutely. In 2026, we’re consistently processing a high volume of freight offers a month on Trans.eu. In the final week of March alone we hit an all-time record, which is nearly 14% above our previous peak from June 2025 — with growth led by Poland, the DACH region, and the Baltics.

But the volume isn’t even the most interesting part. What’s really changed is the logic behind it. Carriers are increasingly rejecting long-term contracts because they don’t reflect real-world costs, and rejection rates on framework contracts can spike surprisingly high in tense market periods. 

Shippers have noticed this, and instead of treating it as a failure of planning, more of them are strategically diversifying capacity toward spot — because it responds to real, current demand, with carriers who actually have capacity and the motivation to execute. Long-term contracts still offer price certainty, but they don’t guarantee execution. Spot increasingly does.

Critics of digital platforms sometimes argue that freight exchanges contribute to “price dumping” and artificially drive down rates through algorithmic price suggestions. How do you respond to the accusation that, instead of stabilizing the market, technology is actually fueling a race to the bottom?

At its core, Trans.eu serves as a bridge, fostering direct connections between shippers, transport operators and carriers to generate mutual value. While we empower these partners with sophisticated tools to streamline platform engagement and maximize outcomes, the finalization of agreements remains entirely within their domain; we provide the digital architecture for negotiation without intervening in or supervising the specific contractual terms they ultimately define.

That said, I’d push back on the framing. A price suggestion based on real transaction data isn’t setting the price — it’s reflecting what’s actually happening in the market at that moment, on that route, with that capacity. 

What actually drives a race to the bottom is the opposite of transparency: it’s carriers and shippers / forwarders negotiating blind, with no visibility into what a fair market rate looks like, which is exactly the environment where undercutting thrives. Aggregated, transparent data doesn’t fuel a race to the bottom — it takes away the information asymmetry that makes it possible in the first place. 

On the flip side, Trans.eu sits on a massive mountain of transactional data. How are you leveraging these aggregated data and analytics (such as Market Insights tools) to help carriers and shippers accurately price risk and plan budgets, rather than just “guessing” rates?

Sitting on a mountain of data is one thing; the real value is transforming it into tools that drive daily decisions. In today’s logistics, the ultimate enemy of profitability is operating in the dark and relying on pure guesswork or outdated Excel sheets. We are changing this. Trans.eu is moving from a passive freight exchange to an analytical backbone for transport operations, embedding unique insights directly into the daily workflow.

First of all, we are shifting from self-declared profiles to behavioral data. Instead of relying on what companies claim in their bios, we analyze their real-time transactional activity across the entire platform. We show where a partner actually drives, their transaction history, market tenure, and financial risk signals. This allows shippers and forwarders to accurately price risk before a contract is even generated.

The same logic applies to contract logistics, where long-term rates quickly lose relevance as market conditions shift. Through advanced route and dedicated operation analytics, we enable companies to constantly monitor rate efficiency, margins, and capacity gaps. 

For enterprise-scale organizations, these aggregated insights serve as the foundation for advanced Business Intelligence reporting. It allows logistics directors and compliance teams to connect the dots between spot market volatility and contract stability, forecasting upcoming budgets based on live operational costs rather than static historical estimates. 

In practice, these reports enable companies to precisely audit cost structures on every route, measure actual savings, and ruthlessly track carrier performance – showing in black and white who causes delays and who actually meets their KPIs.

To sum it up, we eliminate information asymmetry. We provide visibility into what operators actually do, not just what they say they do. This transforms rate and risk calculations into pure mathematics, rather than a lottery.

Safeguarding the supply chain: data integrity and fraud prevention

Increased liquidity on the spot market unfortunately comes with higher risk. The industry is currently sounding the alarm over a surge in fictitious pickups and identity fraud. How significant of a challenge is this for Trans.eu, and where do you draw the line between digital automation and the necessity for manual, rigorous vetting of new users on the platform?

It’s a major challenge for the industry as a whole, and that’s exactly why we’ve invested heavily in cybersecurity. What we run is essentially a network where companies that often don’t know each other can offer a vehicle and book cargo with one another — and that model, by its nature, carries real fraud risk. 

According to TAPA, fraud losses in the European supply chain exceeded €2.7 billion between 2022 and 2024. A European Parliament study puts EU cargo crime alone at up to €8.3 billion a year, with global losses estimated at $40 billion. What’s most concerning isn’t the number, it’s the method: criminals today don’t need to force a lock, they need convincing fake documentation and a fabricated email address — what’s known as the “ghost carrier.”

On automation versus manual vetting, I don’t see it as a binary choice, and honestly most of the work happens before a company ever gets to book anything. We spend a significant amount of time authorising which companies can even access the network, and our requirements and controls are strict enough that a large number of applicants simply don’t make it onto the platform at all. Every carrier, forwarder, and shipper has to pass a multi-layered authorisation process: identity verification, documentation and business-licence checks, confirmation of company age and track record, and financial verification that goes beyond a basic credit check.

But that’s only the first layer. Once a company is registered, we continuously monitor activity on the platform for anomalous patterns that could signal risk — if a company suddenly starts searching for loads in a segment it wouldn’t normally operate in, if search frequency spikes in an unusual way, or if we detect other abnormal behaviour, we flag it and block that company immediately to prevent fraud before it happens. 

Naturally, we give the affected company the chance to explain the activity so we can unblock a legitimate case as quickly as possible. The conclusion we came to building this is that it’s not enough to check who someone is at registration — you need to know who they are at the moment of every transaction.

Experts argue that the digitalization of logistics, paradoxically, plays into the hands of criminals. From a digital platform operator’s perspective, what does this digital “cat-and-mouse game” look like? Are modern platforms actually capable of staying one technological step ahead of organized crime groups?

It’s a fair characterisation, and I won’t pretend it’s a game we’ve permanently won — nobody in this industry can claim that. What we’re seeing is a systematic migration from physical cargo theft to digital impersonation, and it’s accelerating. 

A common pattern: a criminal network acquires a legitimate carrier’s documents and registers a lookalike domain that differs by a single character. In more targeted cases, they hijack a real company’s email through phishing to silently intercept load assignments.

In both cases, the fraud is invisible until the truck that shows up isn’t the one that was booked. We’ve also seen groups buying clean, older transport entities on the underground market specifically to bypass age- and credit-based vetting.

Can platforms stay ahead? Only if verification is continuous rather than a one-time checklist. That’s the principle we’ve built around: identity, compliance, and security credentials validated at every transaction, not declared once and filed away. It’s an ongoing race, not a solved problem — but the architecture of continuous verification is what keeps us ahead rather than reacting after the fact.

But personally, I also believe that security must be a commitment shared by every participant interacting on these platforms. If we all share the same values and equally prioritize implementing the necessary security measures and reporting anything suspicious, we will contribute to maintaining a safer, more robust work ecosystem. Technology is an aid, but the mindset must be collective.

In a traditional supply chain, security was all about padlocks, seals, and monitored parking lots. Today, digital security during the freight-forwarding phase is becoming paramount. How does Trans.eu safeguard the integrity of cargo data to ensure that sensitive information regarding routes or high-value goods doesn’t leak and become a “blueprint” for thieves?

That comparison is exactly right, and it’s how we think about it internally too: the digital infrastructure has to be at least as secure as the vetting process that governs who gets access to it in the first place. For us, security isn’t limited to who can access the platform — it extends to how data is protected at every stage, how the infrastructure is hardened, and how we’re held accountable to externally verified standards.

Concretely, Trans.eu has held ISO/IEC 27001 certification for eight consecutive years — the internationally recognised standard for information security management — maintained through annual internal audits plus independent third-party audits. At the infrastructure level, we host across two secure European data centres: one in Poland, with Talex, and the other on AWS. Both are state-of-the-art facilities with strong physical and logical security, constant monitoring, activity records, and CCTV.

And then there’s the access layer, which is really where the “blueprint” risk gets neutralised: route and cargo detail isn’t visible to just anyone browsing the market. It’s only exposed to counterparties who’ve already been through our Standard Authorisation Procedure — identity, licensing, and financial verification — so a company can’t simply sit on the platform harvesting information about high-value shipments without ever intending to move them. When you operate on Trans.eu, you’re entering a vetted ecosystem where verification never really stops, for as long as you and your partners stay active.

Automation and transaction speed are the core benefits of the spot market, but they also introduce risk—the less time there is for vetting, the higher the chance of an oversight. Are you planning to implement AI or biometric-based solutions that could provide instant, yet foolproof, identity verification for both the carrier and the driver at the exact moment a freight order is accepted?

Today, artificial intelligence is being incorporated somewhat indiscriminately, without fully identifying the actual use cases we want to address. There’s a lot of ‘hype’ suggesting it’s a silver bullet for everything.

However, we recognize that this is a process that must be approached with great responsibility. At Trans.eu, we have identified specific use cases where it adds genuine value, and those are what we are currently developing. I can’t go into further detail yet, but we will be scaling these capabilities gradually.

Our goal is to provide value to our customers, ensuring that our platform helps them find what they need with less effort and time. Instead of chasing marketing buzzwords, we deploy AI where it already brings indisputable, secure, and tangible value today – in automating tedious, everyday work. A prime example is our new Quick Filling solution for freight creation.

We all know what a forwarder’s reality looks like: load data pours in chaotically through emails, PDFs, or even photos and screenshots. Retyping all of this manually is a massive waste of time and a recipe for mistakes. We leveraged artificial intelligence that can instantly “read” such a document or message, automatically extract key parameters, and fill out the offer form on its own.

Crucially, in the context of risk, the AI only creates a draft. The final decision and the single click to approve publication always remain with a human. This perfectly illustrates our philosophy: we strip away the boring, repetitive tasks and cut the process down to seconds, while leaving full control in the hands of the user. This isn’t some distant melody of the future – this tool is already being used to create around 100,000 freights a week on our platform, effectively putting an end to the era of mindless data retyping.

The future of freight: smart automation and predictive metrics

Looking ahead, how fully automated will the spot market become through AI? Will we reach a point where shippers’ systems bid on and sign digital contracts with carriers’ systems without any human intervention? How close are we to that reality?

I think we’re heading somewhere close to that, but I’d resist putting a firm date on full autonomy. What I do believe is that we’re moving from digitalisation to what I’d call “agentisation.” For the last decade, this industry moved from paper to screens. 

The next few years will be about AI agents that don’t just assist a dispatcher with repetitive tasks, but act on their behalf — a negotiation agent managing rate discussions, a verification agent cross-checking compliance, a pricing agent responding to real-time conditions. By 2030, I’d expect logistics to function almost like a digital brain, orchestrating flows across the continent.

But none of that works without trust as the foundation — verified carriers, transparent transactions, secure data. An AI agent can’t be allowed to make an autonomous decision on your behalf unless the identity and compliance of the counterparty on the other side is already verified. 

That’s why I don’t see full automation and security as separate roadmaps — the second is the precondition for the first. And I’d add: we’re taking a more disciplined approach — identifying concrete use cases, scaling them gradually. Smart, but fair to the people relying on the system.

If you were to point to just one key metric or trend on the spot market that logistics managers should watch closely over the coming months, what would it be?

I’d watch the gap between contract rejection rates and spot execution rates, rather than headline freight rates themselves. When carriers start rejecting framework contracts at a high rate and shippers respond by shifting more capacity to spot — not reluctantly, but strategically — that’s the clearest signal of where the market’s real capacity and real risk actually sit. Rate indices tell you what happened. That gap tells you what’s about to happen.