Winning Global Business Trust: The Next Challenge for Arbitration Centres

Businesses stopped debating whether to use arbitration years ago. The question now is where to seat the clause, and that increasingly comes down to which arbitration centre has that unique competitive advantage – one that is determined by not just caseload numbers but by something more.

Every major arbitration centre now claims to be neutral, efficient, and trusted by global business. Most of that claim rests on marketing copy rather than evidence. Businesses stopped debating whether to use arbitration years ago; the real decision now is where to seat the clause, and that increasingly comes down to which institution can back its promises with a track record. For arbitration leaders, this changes what actually needs defending: not the case for arbitration itself, but the specific claim that their institution is the safest place to bring one.

The market for institutional arbitration has expanded and fragmented at once. New centres have opened across the Gulf, Asia, and Africa, each pitching itself as a neutral forum. Yet caseloads remain concentrated among a small group of long-established institutions, and the gap between the leaders and everyone else keeps widening.

The ICC International Court of Arbitration registered 841 new cases in 2024. Overall volume dipped slightly from the year before, but the value of disputes hit a record $102 billion (USD), pushing the ICC’s pending caseload to its highest ever. That combination – flat volume, rising value – matters more than it might seem: it suggests businesses are not sending the ICC more disputes, but they are trusting it with bigger ones, which is a different and arguably stronger form of confidence.

SIAC in Singapore has been on a similar upward run, and its 2025 numbers show its second-highest caseload on record. London’s LCIA has held steadier, with a strongly international docket. DIAC in Dubai is the largest arbitral institution across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, with construction and real estate disputes now dominating its caseload. Beyond these four, regional players in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Paris, and increasingly Latin America and West Africa are also building caseloads, though from a much smaller base and without the decades of track record that anchor the leaders.

This is a landscape of record activity at the top and intensifying pressure elsewhere. Independent survey data confirms arbitration itself remains the clear preference for resolving cross-border disputes. But preference for the mechanism does not automatically mean preference for a specific institution. That distinction now drives the competitive battle among centres.

Trust in an arbitration centre is not built through marketing but through decades of consistent casework, transparent reporting, and predictable outcomes.

The ICC’s standing rests on scale and sectoral depth, with construction, engineering, and energy disputes forming the backbone of its docket. The ICC Court also functions as an independent scrutiny body, reviewing every draft award before it is issued and sending a meaningful share back for revision – a quality-control mechanism few younger institutions can match. That extra layer of review slows individual cases slightly, but it is precisely the kind of friction that reassures risk-averse general counsel: an award validated by an independent body carries a credibility and weight that one without such scrutiny simply cannot match..

SIAC’s growth reflects deliberate rules innovation paired with regional anchoring across Asia’s major economies. The LCIA’s trust capital is rooted in London’s judicial infrastructure and its long history of handling sovereign and state-related disputes. DIAC has spent the past few years rebuilding investor confidence through visible operational reform rather than rhetoric. What unites all four is a demonstrated ability to publish detailed, verifiable statistics year after year. Transparency itself has become a trust signal.

The 2025 QMUL/White & Case survey cuts through institutional self-promotion and offers the clearest picture of what actually moves corporate confidence. It found the ICC Rules, HKIAC Rules, SIAC Rules, LCIA Rules and UNCITRAL Rules stood out as the five most preferred, with the ICC ranking in the top three virtually everywhere. On seats, London remains the top choice, with Singapore and Hong Kong close behind.

Four differentiators emerge consistently.

• Procedural efficiency tops the list – expedited procedures, early determination of unmeritorious claims, and consolidation or joinder mechanisms are the tools users value most. Institutions that put these tools into practice – and not just on paper – gain a decisive edge.
• Arbitrator diversity has moved from aspirational to competitive, as clients scrutinise panel composition more closely than ever before.
• Enforcement reliability matters too. Centres in New York Convention jurisdictions with strong judicial support retain an edge that newer centres just cannot shortcut.
• Cost and duration predictability matters more than prestige for most users. Most disputes are modest in size, not the headline mega-cases that dominate coverage, so cost discipline tends to outweigh reputation for the bulk of real users. A mid-sized manufacturer with a USD2 million supply dispute cares far less about an institution’s flagship cases than about whether the process will run to a predictable timetable and budget. Centres that publish average and median figures for cost and duration, rather than only headline totals, tend to earn more trust from this majority of users.

The structural advantage held by legacy institutions compounds over time in ways newer centres cannot overcome through rules reform alone. Three barriers stand out.

• Arbitrator pool depth: established centres draw from panels built over decades, and that nuance and diversity simply cannot be manufactured quickly.
• Precedent despite confidentiality: institutional reputations rest on aggregate patterns – timelines, cost-scrutiny, challenge-success rates – accumulated only through sustained volume, so a five-year record carries far less reassurance than a fifty-year one.
• Network effects: arbitration clauses are drafted years before a dispute arises, and changing the ‘default’ institution in standard templates means overturning entrenched habits, which favours incumbents.

This does not mean newer centres cannot compete. DIAC’s own history proves the point. Even after a disruptive 2021 restructuring, it clawed back relevance through a genuine architectural rebuild, including a new technology partnership with Opus 2, rather than through incremental tweaks.

Technology has become necessary, though not sufficient, for competitiveness. Leaders who treat it as an IT initiative rather than a client-experience priority are misreading the moment.

Case management platforms are now standard among top-tier centres. SIAC launched its own digital case management system in 2024, built with Opus 2, enabling real-time tracking and e-filing. These platforms affect document turnaround, hearing scheduling, and cost transparency – the everyday details that determine repeat business more than headline case wins do.

AI adoption is accelerating across the arbitration community, and centres offering clear guidance on permissible use position themselves as forward-looking without compromising integrity. The institutions moving fastest here are not necessarily building their own AI tools; they are publishing usable protocols on disclosure, verification, and liability when AI assists document review or legal research, giving tribunals and counsel a shared reference point instead of leaving each case to improvise its own rules.

Operational excellence extends beyond software, to award quality control and timeline discipline. The ICC, for instance, applies arbitrator fee reductions when award delays are unjustified, showing active policing of quality rather than passive administration. For CXOs, the calculus resembles vendor due diligence – transparency, enforcement discipline, credentialed arbitrators, and predictable costs, taken together.

How common is third-party funding in international arbitration today?

It has moved from niche to mainstream. The number of funded arbitrations has grown sharply over the past few years, and most global arbitration users now say they favour funding arrangements, citing efficiency and risk-sharing. Institutions are responding with disclosure rules – HKIAC’s 2024 rules, for example, now require parties to disclose funding and the funder’s identity.

Are emergency arbitrator applications still widely used for urgent interim relief?

Usage has actually declined at the ICC in recent years, with applications falling to their lowest point since 2015. Some practitioners attribute this to parties increasingly turning to domestic courts for interim measures instead.

How long does institutional arbitration typically take from filing to award?

At the ICC, average case duration has improved in recent years. The exact duration, however, varies widely across institutions and case types, and is worth scrutinising alongside cost when comparing forums.

Do businesses actually want more transparency in arbitration, or do they prefer confidentiality?

The evidence points firmly toward confidentiality. In the 2025 QMUL/White & Case survey, an overwhelming majority of respondents supported keeping commercial arbitration hearings confidential, while support for publishing arbitral awards was far more mixed.

What specifically are arbitration users looking to use AI for, and what concerns them?

The appetite is concrete: most respondents expect to use AI for research, data analytics, and document review, mainly to save time. The chief hesitation is quality control – concern about AI errors and bias remains the biggest obstacle to wider adoption.

The next phase of competition among arbitration centres will not be won on caseload numbers alone. It will be won by institutions that treat transparency, procedural discipline, arbitrator diversity, and technological modernisation as one integrated mandate, not separate departmental jobs. Legacy institutions retain formidable advantages, but these aren’t permanent; they must be defended. For emerging centres, the path forward is not imitating individual features of established players – it is matching the discipline behind them.

Sources

ICC Dispute Resolution Statistics 2024 – International Chamber of Commerce

ICC 2024 Arbitration and ADR Preliminary Statistics – ICC

SIAC Annual Report 2024 (full report, PDF)

SIAC Annual Report 2025: Key Statistics and Trends – Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer

LCIA 2024 Annual Casework Report – London Court of International Arbitration

DIAC Annual Report 2024 – Dubai International Arbitration Centre

2025 International Arbitration Survey: The Path Forward – School of International Arbitration, Queen Mary University of London, in partnership with White & Case LLP

2025 International Arbitration Survey – White & Case LLP

ICC Court’s 2024 Statistics – Signature Litigation

Global uptick in third-party funding of international arbitration continues – Pinsent Masons

2025 PAW: Early Insights from the 2025 QMUL Arbitration Survey – Kluwer Arbitration Blog

2025 International Arbitration Survey: Experiences, Preferences and Enforcement – White & Case LLP