FIATA Meaning: Freight Forwarders Federation and Documents

FIATA is the International Federation of Freight Forwarders Associations (from the French Fédération Internationale des Associations de Transitaires et Assimilés). It is the global body representing the freight forwarding and logistics industry, and that is the meaning of the abbreviation on a forwarding document or in a tender.

What FIATA does

FIATA was founded on 31 May 1926 in Vienna by 16 organisations representing the freight forwarding profession across Europe. Today it is a non-governmental, membership-based organisation headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It brings together national freight forwarder associations from around the world, which in turn represent the forwarding firms of their countries. FIATA speaks for the sector towards the World Trade Organization, UN agencies and other international bodies, and works on common rules and training for the profession.

The FIATA documents

The best-known part of its work is a family of standard documents that forwarders worldwide recognise:

• FCR, the Forwarders Certificate of Receipt
• FCT, the Forwarders Certificate of Transport
• FWR, the FIATA Warehouse Receipt
• FBL, the negotiable FIATA Multimodal Transport Bill of Lading, now also issued digitally
• FWB, the non-negotiable FIATA Multimodal Transport Waybill

The documents are distributed country by country through FIATA association members authorised for their territory, so a forwarder obtains them through its national association. The FBL works like a bill of lading for a journey that combines several modes, issued by the forwarder acting as the transport operator.

FIATA documents and the CMR on a road leg

On an international road shipment in Europe the transport document is still the CMR consignment note, made out in three originals: one for the sender, one that travels with the goods and one for the carrier. FIATA documents do not replace it. A forwarder may hand the seller an FCR as proof that it has taken over the goods, which some letters of credit call for, while the haulier that actually drives the truck works under its own CMR note. For the driver and the dispatcher, the CMR is the paper that counts at the ramp and at a roadside check; the FIATA document matters between the forwarder, the shipper and their banks.

The same split applies when something goes wrong. The haulier's liability for the goods follows its own contract of carriage under the CMR, not the FIATA document the forwarder issued. A claim therefore runs along each contract in turn: the shipper against the forwarder, and the forwarder against the haulier it hired.