The central theme at this year’s Sibos conference in Amsterdam, the blue-chip gathering of the world’s top executives in banking and finance organised by SWIFT, focuses on how to best embrace digital transformation while mitigating risk and elevating sustainability.

ESG may be front-of-mind, but how can the wider implications of sustainability help different areas of trade?
While the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) agenda is clearly front-of-mind at the moment and a crucial element of sustainability, the topic is more nuanced than it might first appear.

The aim of the strategy – to “make Europe the first carbon-neutral continent” – was always ambitious. The question now is whether the events over the last 30 months have put the targets out of reach.

It is often debated whether the reported existing trade finance gap, which over the last 3 years has oscillated between $100 billion and $120 billion, will diminish or whether the nature of illiquid, growth-focused, emerging market economies means that the gap will never truly close.

If you mention the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) to any practitioner––from a bank or a corporate––involved in trade finance most, if not all, would associate the organisation with issuance of rules.

It is time to modernise cross border payments and collaborative innovation is the only way to do it, says Alan Koenigsberg, SVP and Global Head of Treasury and Working Capital Solutions at Visa

Your Monday coffee briefing from TFG.

Emerging markets roundtable: understanding and addressing the trade finance challenges for SMEs.

This year’s ITFA 48th Annual Trade & Forfaiting conference, held in Porto, covered a few key themes, one of the most notable being the increasing trade finance gap, which impacts small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging markets the most.

TFG’s Annie Kovacevic sat down with Gordon Cessford, president of Atradius US and regional head of Atradius in North America to understand more about political risks, emerging markets, and digitalisation.

Your weekly coffee briefing from TFG: E-rules for trade explained – URDTT, eURC, and eUCP