IATA's ONE Record standard became the preferred industry data-sharing framework on 1 January 2026, and a senior aviation lawyer thinks cargo carriers should be paying closer attention — not to the technology, but to the contracts sitting underneath it.

Reed Smith partner Anders Nilsson argues the shift to API-driven data exchange hands airlines the infrastructure to monetise capacity, routing intelligence and supply-chain relationships in much the same way passenger carriers monetised loyalty and ancillaries over the past decade. The catch is that most carriers don't actually own the data they'd be selling.

"You cannot monetise an asset you do not own," Nilsson writes.

It's a deceptively simple point. The freight digital booking shift has been led not by airlines but by third-party marketplaces — cargo.one, WebCargo and CargoAi — where carriers list capacity side by side for forwarders to compare. Nilsson likens the dynamic to a hotel on a booking site rather than Ryanair running its own ecosystem.

What does the ONE Record rollout change?

In practical terms, ONE Record replaces decades-old messaging with an API architecture where the originator controls who sees what. That sounds tidy. The principle only holds if an airline's existing agreements — leases, handling deals, technology vendor contracts — haven't already handed those rights away.

Consider aircraft leases. They've long addressed engine condition monitoring and technical documentation, because lessors need them for maintenance oversight and redelivery. They rarely address who can commercially exploit broader intelligence: capacity utilisation, route performance, network analytics. The same goes for cargo handling contracts, where throughput data can be commercially valuable but is rarely addressed. Technology vendor contracts present a subtler version of the problem: if a cargo management platform processes the airline's operational information, who owns the analytical output?

New entrants can sidestep the headache. Riyadh Air, or any carrier building from scratch, can write monetisation clauses into every lease, vendor agreement and handling contract from day one. The platform can be API-native, built around ONE Record rather than retrofitted onto 1970s messaging.

Established operators face the harder task. Most legacy contracts predate the idea that operational intelligence had standalone commercial value. Retrofitting ownership clauses into live agreements is more painful than drafting them in fresh.

Where does cargo have an edge over passenger?

One useful asymmetry. The most monetisable cargo data — shipment volumes, capacity patterns, routing intelligence — is commercial and operational, not personal. That keeps cargo carriers out of the world's 160-plus privacy regimes that passenger airlines navigate through traveller profiles and PNR records. The regulatory friction is lower, Nilsson argues, provided carriers don't inadvertently entangle operational data with personal information and pull everything into stricter territory.

What should a carrier's commercial team do on Monday?

Nilsson's prescription is unglamorous: change the questions in the next contract negotiation. Stop asking only about the core transaction. Ask what operational intelligence the arrangement will generate, who will control it, and whether a partner might pay for it down the road.

"When monetisation potential is considered at the point of contracting — rather than discovered years later, after the rights have already been given away — the airline preserves options it would otherwise lose," he writes.

The carriers that build the habit across procurement, legal and commercial teams will own the partnership upside. The ones that leave it to chance may find, when the opportunity arrives, that the asset they wanted to monetise has quietly become someone else's to exploit.

ONE Record adoption will accelerate through 2026, and carriers that haven't audited their contract stack by then will be negotiating new partnerships from a position they didn't realise they'd conceded.