Shipping’s corporate veil is being pierced by ever more stringent financial and regulatory compliance requirements. Avoiding sanctions requires increasingly forensic due diligence across the supply chain to ensure security ‘red flags’ are not raised by international governments and agencies that now monitor every aspect of shipping’s trade links. On the upside, a fully digitalised supply chain offers a variety of new opportunities but, on the downside, data standardisation and sharing brings with it potential problems surrounding data storage, ownership and transparency. Transparency is potentially a double-edged sword for shipping stakeholders. For every digital advance that enhances efficiency and secures compliance, there are risks of liability and insurance risk.