Members on the UK’s largest haulage platform, which moved over 3 million loads last year, are using Freight Messenger to quote and coordinate work across more than 70 languages.
Two-thirds of Haulage Exchange members have used Freight Messenger, the platform’s messaging tool with built-in translation, since it launched in January as part of membership. They type in their own language, and the person on the other end reads each message in theirs.
UK haulage relies on a multilingual workforce. Around one in seven HGV drivers working in the UK is a non-UK national, according to the Office for National Statistics, before counting the European drivers and operators involved in cross-border loads. A single load can involve several businesses and a driver with no shared first language, coordinating over phone calls, messaging apps and email. Details get missed, and email is increasingly used by criminals posing as genuine carriers.
With Freight Messenger, a haulier writing in Romanian can quote for a load, agree terms with a forwarder writing in English, and pass collection details to a subcontractor writing in Hindi. Every quote, change and confirmation sits in one thread inside the platform. Everyone involved has an agreed record, and the conversation stays off open email.
That matters. In February, cargo security body TAPA EMEA and the International Union of Marine Insurance (IUMI) warned that forged email addresses and lookalike domains are increasingly common in freight fraud. Their joint guidance urges businesses to stick to agreed, secure channels with known contacts, and flags last-minute changes as a warning sign. On Freight Messenger, a revised collection time or new delivery address appears in the same thread as the original booking, making it easier to check.
Lyall Cresswell, Founder and CEO of TEG, Trustd and Haulage Exchange, said: “A load booked in one language, carried in another and delivered in a third is completely normal in freight. Until now, most of that has been pieced together across calls and inboxes, which is slow, easy to misread and harder to trust. Freight Messenger brings it into one conversation, with each member working in their own language. It makes a multilingual workforce an advantage instead of a barrier.”
Freight Messenger is one of a series of developments to the Haulage Exchange app. Further features for operators and drivers on the road are due to be announced in the coming weeks.
