Anders la Cour, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Banking Circle looks at the challenges and opportunities ahead for financial institutions serving SMEs.

One of the global trends is that the net-positive gains from financial integration is quite uneven. Like many parts of the world, ASEAN is facing multiple global challenges under a “VUCA” environment; being volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

Standard identifiers are playing an increasingly important role in finance and trade globally. TFG’s Deepesh Patel heard from Richard Young at FIGI (Bloomberg).

In Global Financial Integrity’s 2019 update “Illicit Financial Flows to and from 148 Developing Countries 2006 – 2015” the estimate of illicit outflows of trade related payments from developing economies for 2015 alone was counted in the hundreds of billions – greater in value in fact than the aid budgets flowing into those countries.

The global trading system is in disarray. Global economic growth is slowing, half the G20 are now operating under openly protectionist agendas, and tensions between China and the United States remain high – despite faint promise of a truce earlier this year. But over in the UK, all of this is overshadowed by the continuing dispute over Brexit. The nation is bitterly divided, and we are fast approaching what could constitute a national crisis.

Over the past few weeks, trade spats have shaken global markets. Worldwide, trade conflicts are being borne of political rather than economic woes — is this the new normal?

There is, so far as I am aware, little or no precedent for what the UK is attempting to do: seeking to reduce unfettered access to its closest and most important market – which also happens to be one of the world’s two largest. In 2018, 46% of the UK’s exports went to the EU, and 54% of UK imports came from it. Almost all countries in the world try to make trade deals, not dismantle them.

Access to affordable trade finance is a condition of success in international trade, to the same extent as rapid clearance of customs and efficient transportation. For decades, successful companies in developed countries have benefitted from the existence of mature financial industries distributing high volumes of finance and guarantees at low rates. Trade finance is normally a high volume and low-cost source of finance, because the risk of default is small, with a global average of 0.2%, and little difference across countries.

International companies are facing the dual challenge of uncertainty and transformation in how they source, produce, transport, sell and trade their goods and services. The question is how can they get ahead of the curve and thrive in this changing environment.

The EBRD’s Trade Facilitation Programme (TFP) was developed to promote and facilitate international trade to, from and within economies where the EBRD invests. Under the TFP, guarantees are provided to international commercial banks (confirming banks), thereby covering the political and commercial payment risk of transactions undertaken by issuing banks. Since the TFP programme was initiated in 1999 the EBRD has financed more than 24,000 transactions for a total of more than €19 billion.