Taking stock of book and claim

opinion

by Fayaz Hussain

December 8, 2025

For decades, if you were buying stocks you had to take delivery of paper certificates. This was a massive problem for brokers when daily trading doubled from 5m shares a day in 1965 to 12m by 1968.

By late 1960s, the problem became so big that trading on Wall Street ground to a near halt in what was known as the ‘Paperwork Crisis’. Brokers were buried in stacks of certificates leading to failed trades. The Securities and Exchange Commission had to shorten the working week so traders could catch up. But this wasn’t enough.

Ultimately, a centralised electronic depository was launched. This did away the need for paper certificates and decoupled asset’s value from its physical location.

The sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) faces the same challenge today. Moving physical SAF molecules to every airport is expensive and counterproductive to the goal of decarbonisation. Kennedy Ricci, CEO of 4AIR, wants to solve this by treating the environmental benefit of SAF as a digital token. Ricci is building the infrastructure to track, verify and procure SAF globally.

Five years ago, when Ricci launched 4AIR, production was measured in thousands of tonnes. The growth since then has been remarkable. Last year saw production exceeded one million tonnes, doubling 2023’s output, which had nearly tripled the previous year’s production.

“We passed about a million tons of SAF last year. That was a doubling of how much SAF we had in 2023, which was a double or almost tripling of what we had the year before,” Ricci tells us. The 2025 production figures are expected to be double of that in 2024.

But unlike conventional aviation fuel, the infrastructure in place is not enough to ensure SAF can be delivered and blended at all major airports around the world. But Ricci says that through its Assure registry, 4AIR can deliver the solution through its book and claim mechanisms separating SAF’s physical product from its environmental attributes. Instead of trucking SAF across continents at significant cost and carbon expense, operators can purchase the sustainability attributes while the fuel itself is sold closer to production sites.

“You’re maintaining some of the sustainability of the fuel instead of taking extra carbon emissions to truck the fuel or transport it,” Ricci explains. “By doing that, you’re also keeping the cost down.”

“We’ve looked at procurement opportunities for a lot of operators across different locations and book and claim solutions could even reduce their cost compared to what they were paying to physically get the fuel to their local airport,” he says.

This approach is resonating with SAF buyers in private aviation and corporate aviation departments. Ricci says they have facilitated transactions across more than 100 FBOs worldwide. But some are still reluctant to see book and claim as a legitimate solution because of the information gap.

“You don’t have to use 100% neat SAF, you can’t anyway,” Ricci points out. “A 10% SAF usage on a neat basis on an aircraft operation might only raise their budget of the operation 1-2%. So it’s minimal when you look across the grand context, but a 10% SAF usage by an operator is a major demand signal to fuel suppliers.”

4AIR says it is helping buyers identify the marginal approach they need to take in order to begin decarbonisation and gradually scale. “Even using a little of SAF from a lot of people goes a long way in showing that the industry does care, does want to take this up, does want use SAF,” he emphasises.

The lack of accounting guidance is also a challenge. “Not having accounting guidance so far has been difficult in getting more people to adopt SAF,” Ricci says, referring to Scope 3 emissions reporting. “We get a lot of ESG departments pushing back and saying well you know we don’t have guidance on how to claim it.”

ESG frameworks are making progress on this front. Earlier this month, SBTi revealed a draft document on the use of SAF certificates for Scope 3 emission. A lot needs to be done on SAF’s eligibility on other scopes.

But Ricci is undeterred. He says operators who would have been unable to access SAF physically can now do it digitally. And the industry doesn’t really have other viable alternatives. “SAF is really the most important tool because of its ability to be drop in to existing aircraft to meet a jet A specification,” Ricci explains.

While the industry is exploring electrification and hydrogen, these technologies face protracted timelines before they can be deployed. Meanwhile, today’s aircraft will remain in service for the 30 to 40 years. “The aircraft we have flying today will technically be flying well into 2060,” he notes.

This means any decarbonisation solutions need to work with existing fleets. And SAF is that solution. The aviation sector needs to finds to deal with the challenges of scaling SAF.

Like Wall Street, which after adopting the ‘book-entry system’, saw more transactions and expanded the investor base exponentially, ‘book-and-claim’ system has the potential to deliver similar results and increase number of SAF buyers.