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BIMCO, Hunit Launch Standard Contracts Pilot
[ December 8, 2025 // Gary Burrows ]BIMCO and self-performing contract platform provider Hunit have launched a joint pilot project that aims to reduce risks, cut manual workloads and modernize the maritime industry’s work with standard contracts, the Danish shipping association said.
The pilot project will address rising operational demands driven by sanctions regimes, increasing safety and emissions requirements, insurer expectations for transparency and more frequent inspections, to name a few.
Today, much of this work to is still managed through PDFs, inboxes and spreadsheets, which increase manual workloads and is an obstacle to the industry’s efficiency, BIMCO said.
The joint pilot project will integrate Hunit’s agentic contract technology and network into BIMCO’s extensive library of standard maritime agreements. The project will apply a technology that turns standard contracts into self-managing agents, addressing efficiency and reducing risks.
Embedding Hunit’s agentic contract technology in a BIMCO standard contract after it has been negotiated and finalized in SmartCon means that the agreement will record the ship’s passage plan, obtain approvals from the correct parties, run sanctions and insurance checks in the background and verify that payments to agents are in place but on hold until release is permissioned.
“The pilot represents a tangible step in transforming the static legal agreements that underpin the maritime sector into active commercial infrastructure,” says Aaron Powers, CEO of Hunit.
Audit-grade records will be logged as each step is completed, and all stakeholders see the same real-time record. The process will allow parties to control risks and increase efficiency because the vessel is managed in strict alignment with the agreed contract terms and because the operational and contractual layers work as one.
Contracts will continue to be negotiated and agreed on BIMCO’s SmartCon contract management platform. Once finalized, Hunit’s technology turns them into self-performing systems that execute their terms in the world. Enriched with Hunit’s structured data, business logic, and AI-enhanced workflows, the contract carries out its operational lifecycle on Hunit’s regulatory-compliant distributed network.
