Somewhere in the gap between what companies are owed and what they actually collect, billions of dollars quietly disappear. Not through fraud, not through negligence, but through process. Duty drawback – the government refund owed to businesses on imported goods that are subsequently exported – is one of the most consistently unclaimed financial assets in global trade. Justin Sherlock, co-founder and CEO of Caspian, has built his company on a single conviction that the gap is not inevitable. It is a systems problem, and systems problems have solutions. “Global trade is full of hidden inefficiencies,” Sherlock says, “and duty drawback is one of the biggest.” At Caspian, the mission is to stop businesses from leaving money on the table and help them reclaim refunds that are already legally theirs.
The Real Cost of a 12-Month Wait
The standard duty drawback process is, in Sherlock’s framing, genuinely painful. Data lives in silos; invoices in one system, shipping records in another, compliance documents somewhere else entirely. Reconciling those sources manually is slow, error-prone, and expensive in ways that go beyond the administrative burden.
When claims drag on for six to twelve months, the cash tied up in those refunds is unavailable for the decisions that actually drive business performance: inventory purchasing, pricing adjustments, and growth investment. Companies are not just waiting for a refund. They are operating without the capital they have already earned. The structural problem, as Sherlock sees it, is that the process’s complexity has historically made the inefficiency feel unavoidable. Most finance teams accept the timeline as a given. Caspian’s argument is that acceptance is the real cost.
What a Modern Approach Actually Looks Like
Caspian’s approach combines AI automation with human expertise across three stages that together eliminate the bottlenecks driving those extended timelines:
- The first is data connectivity: automatically gathering and reconciling trade data from internal systems and customs brokers, removing the manual work that traditionally accounts for the bulk of the delay.
- The second is claim preparation: where Caspian’s expert team takes over the submission process, producing claims that are accurate, compliant, and ready to file.
- The third is centralization: a single dashboard tracking claim status, refund amounts, compliance insights, and payout timelines in one place.
“Fewer spreadsheets, fewer errors, and faster refunds,” Sherlock says. The outcome is not a marginal improvement on the old process. It is a structural replacement of it. The numbers bear that out. In the past year alone, Caspian processed over $50 billion of import value across more than one million unique products. Refunds on those transactions were delivered 75% faster than traditional methods. For the finance leaders on the receiving end, that compression in timeline changes how they think about cash flow planning entirely.
One chief financial officer (CFO) described the shift in terms that capture what the operational change actually feels like from the inside. “What once felt like a black box,” Sherlock recounts, “is now transparent and predictable. Instead of waiting months or years, their money has come back in a few weeks, and Caspian now helps them optimize all their duty spend at a product level.”
The Broader Opportunity
Faster refunds are the most immediate win. But Sherlock’s view of the opportunity extends further than timeline compression. For companies operating complex international supply chains, the visibility that comes with a centralized, data-driven approach to duty drawback creates something more durable than a faster check – it creates intelligence. Product-level insight into duty spend opens decisions that most finance teams have never had the data to make. That is the shift Sherlock is pushing toward: from duty drawback as a reactive, back-office recovery process to an active lever in supply chain cost strategy. The refund is just the beginning of what better data makes possible.
“Reclaiming your money shouldn’t take 12 months,” he says. “With the right tools and expertise, it can happen in weeks.” For exporters still running the old process, the question is no longer whether a better approach exists. The question is how much longer they can afford to wait.
Follow Justin Sherlock on LinkedIn to learn more about how Caspian is modernizing duty drawback and international trade compliance.
