From MVP to an Innovate UK-backed trade analytics platform.
Hanse started life in 2017 as an MVP for a single economist testing a new way to search international trade data. We have built and scaled it ever since into Hanse: a data analytics platform giving businesses monthly UN Comtrade data and BI tools to explore new market opportunities.
From the public site to sector-level trade analysis.
A promising idea, still
working on annual data.
Hanse began in 2017 when economist Dr Ousmène Jacques Mandeng approached High Digital to build an MVP offering detailed, unique international trade search capabilities. The prototype landed well with the financial community — but it only searched annual trade data, and scaling it meant rebuilding a lot more than the interface.
The opportunity came in 2020, when Innovate UK's Sustainable Innovation Fund backed Hanse as a contributor to sustainable economic development for SMEs exploring global markets. That gave us the mandate to rebuild it properly, not just patch the prototype.
Four pillars behind Hanse.
We rebuilt the Hanse website and the data underneath it in step with each other, so a much larger trade database was matched by an interface and BI layer that could actually make sense of it. Four pillars carried the rebuild.
UI design
A full website rebuild with an updated interface and a search experience built around how traders actually look for data, not how the database happens to be structured.
Enhanced trade database
We expanded the platform from annual-only figures to monthly data from UN Comtrade, and increased the number of reporting countries covered.
Integrated BI analytics
Custom dashboards and analysis tools turn raw trade data into something a business can actually act on, not just a table of numbers to export.
UX design
Improved visual design and front-end performance made the platform faster to use and easier to trust, not just more detailed.
From one economist's idea
to a funded platform.
Built on a grant, still growing.
The enhanced Hanse platform launched in September 2021 with expanded search capabilities, greater geographic coverage and real-time monthly trade data — a very different product to the annual-data MVP it started as in 2017.
It was rebuilt to keep going. The data architecture and BI layer underneath were built to take on new sources and countries without another ground-up rebuild.
Monthly trade data, not just an annual snapshot
More reporting countries covered than the original MVP
Custom BI dashboards instead of raw exports
A faster, more trustworthy front-end experience
Direct, real-time access to UN Comtrade figures
An essential tool for SMEs exploring international markets
Where AI does the work in Hanse.
AI is what lets a trader ask Hanse a direct question in plain English, instead of learning the platform's filters to get the same answer — not a chatbot bolted on top, but a second way into the same trusted dataset.
A trillion-row trade database, in plain English.
Hanse's dashboards are built for structured exploration — filtering, comparing, drilling down. The chat layer is the other route in: ask a direct question about global trade flows and get a direct answer, grounded in the same real UN Comtrade data, without first learning where in the platform that answer lives.
Ask the data, don't query it
Type a question in plain English — which countries import the most of a given product, how a trade flow has shifted year on year — and get an answer back, instead of building a filtered export and reading it yourself.
Grounded in the real dataset, not a summary
The chat interface sits directly on top of Hanse's own UN Comtrade data, so an answer reflects the same monthly, multi-country figures the dashboards are built from — not a cached or approximated version of it.
Four years from MVP to funded platform.
Initial MVP
2017
Sustainable Innovation Fund grant awarded
2020
Enhanced platform launch
September 2021
Ongoing enhancements
Currently in progress
What the platform is built with.
A deliberately unexciting stack — chosen because it holds up in production, not because it was new.
Microsoft Azure
Python
FastAPI
MS SQL
UN Comtrade
Power BI
React.jsThe company adjusted swiftly to emerging obstacles and proactively identified needed solutions promptly.Read more client stories
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Questions, answered straight.
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