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Anne-Marie Woolley is a veteran in African trade finance, with a career spanning over 40 years. She has headed up trade departments at Barclays, Standard Bank, Standard Chartered and Nedbank, and became chief executive officer of Africa Global Trade Finance (AGTF) in 2021 following almost four years as a consultant.

AGTF is a boutique trade finance lender for African SMEs that has been owned by impact investment fund Zebu Investment Partners since a buyout in 2021. It focuses on food security and agricultural products, offering short-term transaction finance for pre-sold goods.

Speaking to GTR at AGTF’s workspace in London, Woolley discusses what brought her back to full-time work, how banks’ views on Africa have changed throughout her career and the challenges of lending to SMEs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

GTR: After nearly four years as an independent consultant, you joined the newly spun-out AGTF as CEO; what took you away from freelancing, and how has your experience differed from working in the banking sector?

Woolley: One aspect of being a consultant that I did not like was you go in, you do some work for them, you give them some advice, and then you walk away, and you never know whether or not you’ve made a difference. That didn’t sit well with me.

I wasn’t ready for just not being busy anymore, so I’d been looking for something to do. I found ageism an issue; I took my date of birth off my CV because often I wasn’t even getting an interview. I have come to realise how much experience matters and how much I can actually add, especially to a boutique trade finance house.

I was speaking to a lot of people, and it was through that that I got the original request from Zebu Investment Partners to review AGTF’s due diligence.

That led, first of all, to being invited onto AGTF’s credit committee. It was a part-time job, but I started getting more involved in the business. The founders were looking to try and find a bigger role for me, and when they decided to sell, Zebu asked me to take this job, which was in many ways brave of them, because I had never run a company before even though I had been responsible for large trade finance departments.

[Working at AGTF instead of a big bank] is quite liberating without the politics of a large organisation around you. That said, I understand now how easy it is to lose that governance and oversight that you know is coming from the ‘big brother’, because it’s very easy to think, ‘oh, well, we need to make some profits, and let’s just do this anyway’.

You have to be able to be competitive, you have to be market-oriented, but we stick to the principles, policies and structures that we’ve got. This is key to our success and zero default rate.

GTR: Over the course of your career, how have attitudes towards the African continent evolved in trade and commodities finance?

Woolley: I think attitudes are not that different to how they used to be. Some banks have a presence on the continent, like Standard Chartered, Standard Bank, Absa. They were always keen to do business in Africa, and they have a local presence, which gives them certain insights into the various economies.

Then you have suitcase bankers, who are only really chasing the elephant deals – the Ghana Cocoa Boards, the Sonangols, the various large oil pre-export finance deals – but not a great deal of interest in other kinds of trade.

Lastly you have the correspondent bankers, looking to support African local commercial banks. But many international banks have also scaled this back in recent years, some of which has been replaced by support from DFIs, particularly in the letter of credit confirmation business.

That’s why we still have a huge trade finance gap, because attitudes aren’t changing quickly enough. You’ll get small pockets here and there, but in the aftermath of know-your-customer (KYC) becoming this paper collection process, it became more and more challenging.

The cost of that KYC compliance for trade is hideous. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it’s costly to maintain, and that’s why some of the larger banks stopped doing correspondent banking. If they don’t even do correspondent banking on the continent, what chance do SMEs have [accessing trade finance]?

There is a lot of money to be made financing SMEs if you have the right governance structure and that’s where we got it right. We can scale given the trade finance gap, but we need the funding, which is limited because people still view SMEs very traditionally.

You’ve also got the MSMEs, which are a domestic problem to solve; I can’t lend US$100,000 to 100 clients in Nigeria, from London. It is just not feasible. It has to be something that can be done domestically.

Part of the problem is that it’s a risky business even if you’re doing it right, and it’s an easy business to do wrong. At a conference I was at recently, somebody said that 30% of the deals that get done are fabulous, 40% are probably okay, but just need tight control, and there’ll be another 30% that are out to defraud you.

There are a few companies like AGTF around, but then there’s been a few horror stories that haven’t necessarily helped the industry in wanting to find deals in some of the markets. Different institutions have different reputations of doing things well and some doing things not so well. We have managed to get the structure right with a balance of new energy to get deals in, and experienced middle- and back-office staff.

GTR: How is AGTF, under your leadership, working to close the trade finance gap on the continent, and what are some of the challenges you face in doing so?

Woolley: Sticking to our principles, because in many ways, your reputation is everything. We’re straight with our clients, because there’s no point in overpromising and underdelivering.

We work with our clients to find the best solution for them and us. We try to help our clients understand why we need certain structures. There is always a danger that they say yes to everything because they just want your money. We often work with first-time borrowers, and they need their hands holding. These businesses have often had to be very creative in how they have funded their business up until now, but they now need to work with AGTF to take their companies to the next level. They have to understand the discipline that comes with borrowing from a financial institution and sometimes that’s also about things like who their auditors are and what the construct of their balance sheet looks like.

Being owned by an impact fund, ESG is also a big part of our analysis, especially the social and governance side. Not so much the environment; Africa as a continent is not exactly the biggest polluter in the world. We look at staff, conditions, diversity, who they employ, how they employ them, what their policies are. Almost irrespective of the underlying transaction and the balance sheet itself, we also spend quite a bit of time with our clients, trying to understand the environment in which they work. We feel we are really setting the trend here as ESG becomes more and more important.

That can impact our lending decision, depending on what the goods are. 60% of our business is always food and agri-oriented, but we have a mandate to do 40% outside of that. If you’re doing metals, you have to be a bit more diligent about the conditions of the mining area and pollution, whereas when financing cashew nuts being bought from small-scale farmers, it gets more difficult. For instance, child labour is very different when a farmer has their children on the farm, compared to bringing kids on a bus from another country.