DHL Global Forwarding's EBIT fell about 30% in 2025 on a 5% revenue drop, and Kuehne+Nagel's fell 25% on a 1% drop, numbers a shrinking market alone can't explain.

Accenture's answer, from a freight forwarding trends report published this spring: execution. Manual quoting, billing delays, and routing gaps are draining margin that should be there. Rate volatility used to be cyclical. Now it's structural, because forwarders can't reprice fast enough to keep up with it.

The five things wearing down forwarder margin

Accenture's research names five critical inefficiencies across the forwarding journey. Billing, settlement & costing is one of them, and it's the one with the clearest dollar figure attached: enterprise forwarders are carrying tens of millions of dollars in open invoice disputes per customer relationship, with 30 to 60 day audit cycles trapping working capital the whole time. Zoom out to the industry level, and the number gets worse. Over $10 billion in ocean freight and associated fees was overcharged between 2021 and 2024, and the average forwarder only ever recovers 3.3% of it.

The structural gap between what gets billed and what gets checked is the underlying issue.

Why nobody's fixed it yet

This process is still manual. A small share of lanes drives most quoting activity, but teams are still managing RFQs by hand with outdated rate sheets. By the time a new rate reaches a customer, it's already two to three weeks stale. Billing and settlement inherit the same problem downstream: invoices go out, disputes pile up, and the audit that would catch them takes so long that the dispute window usually closes before anyone gets to it.

Changing the priority list

Here's what makes this worth acting on now instead of filing under "someday": Accenture's own value-versus-effort matrix puts billing, settlement & costing in the highest-value, lowest-effort quadrant — the "quick wins" category. Self-funding ROI in under six months with no transformation risk. Compare that to the "strategic bets" quadrant, which needs 18 months of capital and patience before it pays off. Billing and settlement isn't in that category, but it pays for itself before the year is out.

Closing the gap

The forwarders losing the least margin aren't the ones with the fewest disputes. They're the ones who know, for every dollar billed, exactly what status it's in: paid, disputed, or still in audit- instead of finding out 45 days later that something slipped through. That's the difference between a 30-60 day audit cycle and one that closes before it ever becomes a working capital problem.