Wall Street plays host as North America’s trade & export finance industry leaders converge

Global Trade Review (GTR), the leading source of news and events for the global trade, export and commodity finance sectors, returned to the US for the North America Trade & Export Finance Conference 2015, taking place in Manhattan’s financial district on June 18th.

Amidst resurging economic growth across the continent and ongoing government efforts to seal unprecedented multilateral trade deals, the region’s leading financiers and international companies must now grapple with the ‘new normal’ that is pervading the international trade and financing space: an increasingly challenging climate of financial regulation, growing threats in the form of financial fraud and cybercrime, and volatile flows of liquidity as key global economies begin the seismic transition from Central Bank-led stimulus.

While global trade growth is still lagging behind pre-crisis levels that far outstripped economic performance, the increasingly complex nature of international supply chains pose a significant challenge to the region’s finance providers, who must innovate and collaborate to meet global demands on ever more pressurised balance sheets – all while facing regulatory headwinds that are affecting commercial bank retrenchment from more challenging geographies and private sector segments.

The spectre of reauthorization looms over US Exim once again, constituting a significant question mark over the sustainability of financing sources for the nation’s largest exporters, as well as the raft of SME’s reliant on the institution’s financing support to facilitate their international trade. The 30th June deadline for reauthorization falls just over a week after GTR’s gathering, though positive noises were heard echoing through the halls at Exim’s recent annual conference.

The North America Trade & Export Finance Conference 2015 welcomed a Keynote address from Ambassador Robert Holleyman, Deputy US Trade Representative, while expert speakers from the region’s leading corporates, banks, and supporting sectors provided practical insight on the innovative solutions being supplied to reflect the corporate financier’s continued focus on optimising financial transparency and efficiency whilst managing counterparty and liquidity risks.

Debate on the impact of regulatory and compliance challenges on corporate borrowers featured throughout the one-day programme. In-depth sessions profiled risk and reward trade-offs for those investing in Latin America, assessed the growing utilization of private insurance markets by both banks and corporates for credit enhancement and relief, updated on the ongoing digitization of the trade finance sector, and road-mapped the steps necessary to attract alternative sources of stable liquidity into the export finance space.

“Having held this meeting in New York for over a decade, it’s hugely interesting to compare the leaps and bounds in innovation taken by North American trade financiers and their corporate counterparts to those in comparable markets”, says Peter Gubbins, Founder and CEO of GTR on the side-lines of the event. “This conference has come to act as a temperature gauge for the market and a yard-stick for product offerings – over the years it has played a key role in facilitating the multilateral discussions informing business strategy across the region’s financial and international trading sectors. We’re seeing a major shake-up taking place across the industry globally, and it was fascinating to see how first-movers in one of the world’s most advanced trade finance markets are meeting this new set of challenges”