Global freight forwarders are failing to deliver the customer service their own marketing promises, according to Gal Dayan, the former Apple and UPS executive who became chief operating officer of Ascent Global Logistics on 1 October.

In his first interview since taking the role, Dayan told The Loadstar that consolidation across the forwarding sector — the steady merger of mid-sized players into large groups — has left the biggest operators unable to honour the service commitments they advertise.

His argument is straightforward: scale has a cost, and shippers are paying it.

What does Dayan actually claim?

Dayan's core assertion is that large forwarders promise more than they can operationally deliver. Specialist operators, by contrast, have more room to invest in individual shipper relationships, because their business is not spread across an enormous, undifferentiated customer base.

That is a commercial claim from a competitor, and it deserves scrutiny. Dayan now helps run one of those specialist operators — Ascent — so his critique of the mega-forwarders arrives with an obvious commercial interest attached. He is, in effect, making the sales pitch for the business model he has just joined.

What he did not say, at least in the portion of his remarks made available, is equally telling: no customer-satisfaction data, no service-level metrics, no named carriers or trade lanes where the alleged failures occurred. Shippers reading his comments should weigh the argument on its logic — that consolidation dilutes service attention — rather than on evidence presented.

Who is Gal Dayan?

The appointment carries weight because of the resume behind it. Dayan joins Ascent from a career that includes senior roles at Apple and at UPS — one of the largest parcel and logistics operators in the world by any measure.

That background spans both the shipper side, at a technology giant that moves enormous volumes of finished goods, and the carrier side, at an operator running a global integrated network. A COO who has sat on both sides of the freight transaction is positioned to judge whether large providers actually deliver what they sell.

He took up the post on 1 October, and his first public intervention — an attack on the service standards of the industry's biggest players — signals how Ascent intends to differentiate itself under his operational leadership.

Why does this matter for shippers and forwarders?

For shippers, the claim lands in an ongoing debate: does scale in forwarding translate into better service, or merely better pricing and wider network coverage? Dayan's position is that the trade-off is real, and that the largest forwarders have tilted too far toward scale.

For the big forwarders themselves — the global groups built through years of consolidation — the critique is a warning that service gaps are visible enough for competitors to build marketing campaigns around.

And for mid-sized and specialist forwarders, Dayan's comments amount to a public endorsement of the niche: the argument that focused operators can out-invest their larger rivals in the relationships that retain customers.

What comes next?

Dayan also addressed technology and aircraft ownership in his conversation with The Loadstar, suggesting his agenda at Ascent extends beyond service rhetoric to hard operational assets and digital investment. How quickly that agenda produces measurable results — the only test shippers will ultimately apply — remains the open question for his first year in the chair.