Your Monday morning coffee briefing from TFG. Here are some of the last week’s updates from the trade sector. 17th February 2020.
The Government of Tanzania Ministry of Finance has signed a facility agreement with Standard Chartered Tanzania for a US$ 1.46 billion term loan financing to fund the construction of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) project from Dar es Salaam to Makutupora.
ISO 20022 is the new global language for payments messaging, helping make the quality of data, richer, structured and more meaningful. The payments industry continues to change rapidly and is certainly something that is discussed by most heads of treasury and trade. There is a constant need to adopt global standards within the financial community, and ISO 20022 is one standard that’s taking the lead.
In today’s world, cheques and paper invoices really ought to have taken their place in the Retro Hall of Fame, alongside vinyl, polaroid cameras and the Nokia 3210. Curiously, however, paper-based payment practices have shown serious staying power with cheques still accounting for 51% of B2B payments. Why? A few reasons, but principal among them is ‘fear of the unknown.’
We caught up with Peter Jameson, Head of Trade and Supply Chain, Asia Pacific in Bank of America. We discussed the highlights of 2019 and the opportunities in 2020 for the trade, receivables and supply chain finance. There will be continued pressure on trade flows, with reduced volume, commodity prices, and financing demand. Despite this, Asia Pacific’s growth prospects remain favourable as compared to other regions. Businesses continue to seek growth and focus on further developing their banking needs in the region.
We discussed with AIG some of the challenges and opportunities in the trade credit insurance sector. Enabling the much-needed reduction of the trade finance gap, and bringing in a wider array of investors while mitigating the risks of such expansion in the backdrop of geopolitical uncertainty will be a huge challenge in 2020. However, dealing with a broader collection of participants in the trade finance ecosystem in terms of jurisdictions, size of the borrower, types of assets and fintech entrants set us up for interesting times.
Envoy Group, the innovative London based supply chain and trade finance team, is accelerating its expansion following a $13 million institutional investment committed from Alcedo Digital Ventures. With its end-to-end solution focused on Latin American trade, the company can now process significantly greater trade volumes and launch new functionality, including the NVOY Stellar based tokenised payment solution for frictionless and zero cost payment of cross border trades and related services.
As the most authoritative voice in the trade finance industry, ICC Banking Commission, maintains a permanent dialogue with regulators and supervising bodies, helping to develop regulations affecting the industry.
The title of the EBRD’s transition report 2019-2020 – “Better Governance, Better Economies” – summarises its message well. Good governance matters. It matters at the level of countries, subnational regions and firms…
Your Monday morning coffee briefing from TFG. Here are some of the last week’s updates from the trade sector. 10rd February 2020. Chinese central bank on stability, coronavirus and the markets, UK’s official EU departure
Building any start-up into a successful business is a challenge, including tech start-ups. There was a time when tech was the most popular industry to start a business in, but thanks to this boom, there is now a lot of competition.
The crypto trading scene has changed dramatically over the past couple of years. When the 2017/18 bubble burst, Bitcoin was seen as the mad doginance world and only those who were insanely courageous, or perhaps merely insane, would go anywhere near it. Yet here we are in 2020, the waters of volatility have calmed and both individual hobby traders and institutional investors are getting into crypto trading like never before.
2019 has been a fairly promising year of growth for some emerging and developing markets, but with continued regulatory scrutiny, correspondent banking relationships continuing to be a cut, and a sluggish growth forecast for 2020, what does this mean for trade in EDE’s?
Speaking at Davos, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid stated that the UK will be going ahead with its proposed Digital Tax. Expected to be in place for April 1st, 2020 the tax is designed to target multinational corporations/ conglomerates with a revenue derived from either from the provision of a social media platform, a search engine or an online market place.
