Last month, I found myself staying with a nomad family in a traditional yurt (‘ger’), 300km West of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, staring at the overwhelmingly star-filled night sky.

Just about six months ago, Trade Finance Global reached out to a variety of trade finance experts to help answer some questions we had about the industry. Like always, our friends across the industry came through and provided us with some detailed thoughts on the ins and outs of the trade finance world. 

Correspondent banking is a cornerstone of international finance, offering a critical conduit for transnational transactions and financial services. But as with any large, intricate and partially opaque financial system that relies on mutual trust, it is also a prime target for illicit exploitation, particularly money laundering.

Globalisation is not dead, contrary to recent claims. Nowhere is this more evident than in global trade, where high-growth trade corridors in Asia, Africa and the Middle East are set to outpace the global average by up to four percentage points.

Trade finance plays a vital role in global economic activities, facilitating the movement of goods and services across borders. 

In a bid to enhance access to trade for micro, small, and medium-sized businesses (MSMEs), the World Trade Board has recently launched the ‘Financial Inclusion in Trade Roadmap’. The roadmap, developed through collaboration with major industry bodies and international stakeholders, seeks to address the challenges faced by MSMEs to accelerate their participation in global trade.

With the disruption of the global value chains stemming from COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, Central and Eastern European (CEE) trades are finding themselves in a new business reality. While trade with East Asia is a well-established import region, new primary export destinations are emerging for exporters in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). With the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the main export markets outside the EU for the CEE companies, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, were closed or significantly constrained. 

The potential impact of the UK’s incoming Electronic Trade Documents Bill goes far beyond a boost to the country’s trade prospects. By enshrining in law that a digital document is equivalent to physical paper, the reform means that counterparties can issue and process documents electronically by default, – and with UK law acting as the basis for trade transactions across much of the world, the opportunity for transformation is unprecedented.

The ICC has unveiled eUCP Version 2.1, an alignment of the eUCP with the UNCITRAL MLETR

At ICC Austria’s Trade Finance Week, Trade Finance Global spoke with Isaac Mahanke, group head for traditional trade products at Standard Bank, to shed light on the prevalence and advantages of demand guarantees in Africa.