Today, Trade Finance Global (TFG) and the Bankers Association for Finance and Trade (BAFT) launch “From lenders to leaders: Banks in flux,” a whitepaper detailing the unique challenges and opportunities faced by banks in the global trade space in 2025.
The whitepaper, based on a discussion held during the BAFT Global Councils Forum 2025 in September in Frankfurt, Germany, features insights from leaders in major global banks and institutions.
As businesses worldwide face trade uncertainty and economic headwinds, banks are coming to occupy a singular position, advising corporate clients through periods of uncertainty while simultaneously implementing their own institutional transformations in response to the same forces.
The whitepaper is designed as a moment in time, to provide a guide as to the current challenges facing banks and financial institutions around the world in 2025. It examines the evolving role of banks in global trade as they navigate unprecedented disruption from tariffs, shifting ESG priorities, regulatory complexity, financial crime, and rapid digitisation in 2025.
The world of global trade in 2025 looks a bit like the moving staircases at Hogwarts. Generally, trade is expected to connect and move the global economy upwards. But “beware of the supply chains: they like to move.” Banks were once responsible for financing the journey, but have found themselves with a new job description: part navigator, part fellow traveller, part architect of the route itself.
The narrative around these changes in trade tends towards the binary and the dramatic: tariffs as unambiguous disaster, AI as existential threat, ESG as either the salvation of global commerce or an albatross around the neck of profitability. But sit in a room with the bankers and corporates actually wrestling with these forces on a daily basis, and a more nuanced picture emerges.
What emerges in the whitepaper, however, is not a sense of crisis, but of recalibration. Banks are learning to operate in an environment where uncertainty is the only constant, where today’s strategic priority might be tomorrow’s liability, where the challenge isn’t predicting the future but building the flexibility to respond to it.
Banks have the tools to shape outcomes, to encourage certain behaviours over others, to accelerate or slow various transformations. The more interesting question – the one this whitepaper grapples with – is what they should be incentivising, and why.
Download the whitepaper here.
