For more than two decades, Michele Sancricca has operated at the deep end of global logistics, maritime operations, supply chain technology and large-scale infrastructure. His career spans roles across MSC logistics and maritime operations, Amazon inbound logistics, cloud infrastructure at AWS, and commodity trading.
Today, as Founder & CEO of Secro, he is focused on what he calls the “pre-digital infrastructure problem” in asset-intensive industries – and on how infrastructure-layer technology can unlock meaningful alpha in sectors that still rely on legacy systems and paper-heavy workflows.
One example illustrates Secro’s impact. In many global trade and supply-chain transactions, even the largest organisations still rely on emails, messaging apps and offline tools to agree on critical data and documents – creating upstream inconsistencies that cascade into delays, disputes and risk downstream. Secro provides a shared, auditable and legally compliant layer where multiple parties collaboratively create and validate the documents that underpin high-value cross-border transactions. By reducing transactional risk and eliminating errors at the source, Secro has helped large enterprises unlock multi-million-dollar improvements in EBITDA, faster settlement cycles, and materially lower operational and compliance costs – impact that scales proportionately with the size of the organisation.
We sat down with Michele for an interview to unpack his thesis, Secro’s strategy, and what all of this means for C-suites operating in asset-heavy, regulation-intensive environments.
Q1. You’ve spent over two decades across the Navy, MSC, Amazon and AWS. When did you first recognise the systemic “pre-digital infrastructure” problem in industries moving physical goods?
Michele:
The pattern became clear over time rather than in a single moment.
Across maritime operations, logistics and cloud infrastructure, I kept seeing the same thing: industries that move physical goods at massive scale still rely on what are essentially pre-digital workflows at the information layer.
Ships, ports, warehouses and fleets are increasingly digitised, but the transactions that govern who owns what, who bears which risk, and when capital can move – those are still handled through legacy infrastructure, fragmented systems and document-driven processes.
Once you see that, you realise the biggest bottleneck isn’t the physical movement of goods. It’s the infrastructure that governs how information, trust and value move around those goods.
Q2. You argue that true alpha lies in infrastructure-layer technology. What patterns did you repeatedly see that led you to this thesis?
Michele:
In asset-intensive industries, most technology investment goes into optimising operations – routing, capacity, forecasting, efficiency. That’s valuable, but it’s rarely where the real alpha sits.
The real leverage is in the infrastructure layer: the systems that define ownership, rights, obligations, documentation and risk allocation.
In areas like trade finance, we’re talking about trillions of dollars moving through workflows that were designed decades ago. A meaningful share of value is lost to delays, disputes, manual checks and reconciliation between incompatible systems.
When you apply enterprise-grade technology at that infrastructure layer, you’re not just making people faster. You’re changing the economics of how capital, risk and information flow. That’s where genuine operating leverage comes from.
Q3. Trade finance is often described as one of the last major sectors to digitise. What do you think people misunderstand about its inefficiencies?
Michele:
People often reduce the problem to “too much paperwork”. That’s an oversimplification.
In trade finance, documentation isn’t just paper. It represents legal rights and obligations across multiple jurisdictions. It’s how you prove ownership, pledge collateral, evidence performance and enforce claims.
When documentation is inconsistent, delayed or disputed, it doesn’t just slow things down – it impacts capital deployment, risk appetite, pricing and ultimately the returns of everyone involved.
So the inefficiency is not about inconvenience. It’s systemic, because it affects how quickly and confidently capital can be put to work.
Q4. You describe Secro as taking a regulatory-first approach across key jurisdictions. Why make regulatory positioning the core of your strategy rather than an afterthought?
Michele:
Because in this space, technology without legal enforceability is just a prototype.
If you want institutions to treat digital documents and workflows as equivalent to traditional instruments, you have to start with the legal and regulatory foundations: which frameworks recognise digital documents, under what conditions, and with what level of enforceability.
From the beginning, Secro has focused on aligning with major legal and trade frameworks and engaging directly with regulators and practitioners. That’s slow work, but it creates structural moats. It’s much harder to replicate deep regulatory alignment and institutional trust than it is to replicate a feature.
In other words, regulation isn’t a constraint to be worked around. It’s part of the product and part of the moat.
Q5. Many founders understand consumer fintech, but few understand enterprise-grade infrastructure. What is fundamentally different about building systems that financial institutions can trust with mission-critical operations?
Michele:
In consumer apps, a failure is frustrating. In enterprise infrastructure – especially in finance and trade – a failure can be catastrophic.
You’re dealing with high-value transactions, regulatory scrutiny and reputational risk. The tolerance for downtime, data inconsistency or ambiguous audit trails is close to zero.
Building infrastructure-layer SaaS for these environments means:
- Designing for reliability, auditability and compliance from day one
- Integrating into legacy systems rather than assuming a greenfield environment
- Supporting workflows where system failure can cost millions per hour, not just lost clicks
That’s a very different design space from building a consumer-facing product. It requires both technical depth and lived experience in how these industries actually operate.
Q6. Your clients include tier-one banks and major trading houses. What measurable value have you seen your infrastructure create for them?
Michele:
The impact shows up in a few clear areas.
For trading firms, we see material reductions in document review and reconciliation cycles. That translates directly into faster deal execution and better use of working capital.
For banks and financial institutions, digitising and standardising documentation helps remove entire categories of disputes and manual exceptions. It improves the quality of risk assessment and reduces operational and compliance exposure.
And then there’s the network effect: when more counterparties use a shared infrastructure layer, every participant benefits. New connections don’t require starting from scratch; they plug into something that already understands the rules, the documents and the workflows.
Q7. Where do you see the next major opportunities for infrastructure-layer SaaS in asset-intensive sectors like logistics, commodity trading, defence procurement or insurance?
Michele:
Anywhere you have high-value transactions, complex documentation and regulatory requirements, you likely have an under-optimised infrastructure layer.
Logistics, commodity trading, defence procurement, large-ticket insurance, even parts of maritime and aviation – many of these sectors still run on fragmented systems and bespoke manual processes.
The next wave of opportunity is in building horizontal infrastructure that:
- Applies to multiple sectors moving physical goods and capital
- Works with existing systems rather than forcing full replacement
- Embeds regulatory and legal understanding directly into the workflow
The winning platforms will be the ones that understand both the technical architecture and the institutional context.
Q8. Finally, what should today’s C-suite rethink when evaluating digital infrastructure investments?
Michele:
I’d encourage C-suites to stop viewing infrastructure purely as an IT cost centre and start viewing it as a source of alpha.
The key questions are:
- Does this infrastructure meaningfully reduce our operational and legal risk?
- Does it accelerate how quickly we can deploy or recycle capital?
- Does it improve our margins by removing structural friction, not just labour hours?
- Does it strengthen our position in the wider ecosystem – with banks, regulators, counterparties?
In asset-intensive industries, the organisations that treat digital infrastructure as a strategic asset – not just a technology upgrade – will be the ones that capture the most durable advantages.