Uncertainty Is the New Operating Environment for Freight Forwarders and Customs Brokers

The numbers back that up.

In a survey of 125 freight forwarders and customs brokers conducted in early 2026, two-thirds of respondents said the level of uncertainty facing their industry is higher today than it was three years ago, with tariffs, geopolitical tensions, regulatory complexity, and rapid technological change cited as the primary drivers. Only 16% said uncertainty was lower or about the same as it used to be.

That shift shows up just as clearly outside the survey. The Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2026 Global Trade Report found that nearly three-quarters of trade professionals now consider U.S. tariff volatility the single most impactful regulatory change affecting global trade this year. Tariff rates have moved through multiple rounds of increases, court challenges, and partial rollbacks in the past year alone, and each shift ripples through duty calculations, sourcing decisions, and customer expectations almost immediately.

Customs Brokers as News Reporters

Nowhere is this more visible than in customs brokerage, where trade policy translates directly into what a client owes on a shipment. Luis Martinez, Owner and COO of Cabrera Llamas Forwarding, put it bluntly in his interview for the report: on top of being a customs expert, he now has to function like a news reporter, tracking rumors about tariff changes as closely as the changes themselves.

Veronica Diaz and John Clarke of Clarke International Services described a related frustration. Their team has seen a sharp rise in requests for duty rate quotes, but a quote issued today can be outdated within a month, sometimes within a day, as policy shifts under them.

This isn’t a uniquely North American problem, and it isn’t temporary. Genpact’s global supply chain lead told FreightWaves that companies that invested early in visibility and scenario-planning tools during and after the pandemic were far better positioned to absorb this tariff cycle than those still relying on manual tracking and case-by-case research. The lesson from both the Magaya report and outside reporting is consistent: the volatility itself may not be predictable, but how prepared an organization is to respond to it absolutely is.

The Gap Between Good and Excellent

The Magaya and Adelante SCM survey also asked forwarders and brokers to rate their own ability to make fast, data-driven operational decisions. Nearly 60% rated themselves as good or excellent. But when the responses are broken down further, only 13% considered their decision-making truly excellent, defined as fast, consistently data-driven, and high quality. The rest described their capabilities as generally solid but inconsistent, with real gaps in speed or data quality.

That gap between “good” and “excellent” matters more than it might first appear, and it isn’t unique to freight forwarding. Gartner’s most recent supply chain research found that while the overwhelming majority of supply chain organizations say they need to react to change quickly, only a small fraction, in the single digits, can actually execute decisions in real time. Across the broader supply chain world and within freight forwarding specifically, the constraint isn’t a lack of urgency, it’s execution.

Damon Piatek of Piatek Customs & Logistics described what closing that gap looks like in practice. His company has grown by moving beyond transaction processing and integrating more deeply with customers, effectively becoming an extension of their operations rather than a vendor they call when something needs to move. That kind of integration depends on having accurate, current data readily available, not buried in a spreadsheet or waiting on an email reply from three departments away.

Building the Muscle for Faster Decisions

None of this means freight forwarders and customs brokers need to predict the next tariff announcement or geopolitical shift. As one survey respondent in the Magaya and Adelante SCM report put it, competitive advantage increasingly comes down to getting quicker insights, making data-driven decisions, and having best-in-class reaction time. The companies pulling ahead aren’t the ones with a crystal ball. They’re the ones who’ve shortened the distance between a policy change and a confident response.

That starts with visibility into the data that actually drives decisions: current duty rates, shipment status, compliance requirements, and customer history, all in one place rather than scattered across systems and inboxes. It also means giving frontline staff, the people fielding client questions about a tariff that changed overnight, direct access to that information instead of routing every question up the chain.

This is exactly where the right freight management and customs compliance platform earns its keep. Magaya’s tools are built to give forwarders and brokers real-time visibility into shipment and compliance data, so a duty rate quote reflects what’s actually happening today rather than what was true when it was last checked. When uncertainty is the baseline rather than the exception, the ability to respond quickly, backed by accurate data rather than guesswork, is what separates the businesses treading water from the ones building genuine advantage.

This article draws on findings from The New Strategic Logistics Service Provider, a 2026 report from Adelante SCM and Magaya based on a survey of 125 freight forwarders and customs brokers and executive interviews from the Momentum by Magaya conference. Read the full report for additional data and executive perspectives.