denotes premium content | Dec 5 2008 Trade & Forfaiting Review magazine archive
Volume 3 Issue 7
Features
BANK SERVICES:What to expect from your bank
Colin Linton, head of trade services and John Eggleton, product manager, structured trade finance, both in NatWest Corporate Banking Services, look at the challenges faced by exporters and how a focused international bank can meet the needs arising from these challenges. One in four mid and large UK corporates use NatWest as their main provider of international services.
COLLATERAL MANAGEMENT: Continental catch-up
At the last US Commercial Finance Association (CFA) Convention in London last year, Pierre Bacquelaine, general manager at Société Auxiliaire de Garanties (AUXIGA) of the WARRANT Group in Brussels, was struck by how much asset-based lenders from the Anglo-Saxon world made of the obstacles that apparently make the development of their financing techniques on the old continent a complex affair. He looks at asset-based lending French style.
COMMODITY FINANCE:Online or bust?
How are commodity traders, brokers and exchanges threatened by the internet? Justin Pugsley finds out.
COUNTRY FOCUS:BRAZIL: Is Brazil bouncing back?
After a better than expected performance in 1999, Brazil enters 2000 with further recovery in sight. Its economy is on the right track, but the consolidation of growth depends on the country's ability to successfully meet challenges ahead. Both on the domestic and on the external fronts there are significant risks that, should they materialise, could hamper Brazil's upturn. Isabel Costa, economist, and Renato Schulman, director, at Banco Finantia report.
COVER & PAYMENTS TABLE:LATIN AMERICA & CARIBBEAN 3.7
ECA and private insurance cover for the region, plus other economic and social data.
COVER STORY: COLLATERAL MANAGEMENT:Security in the middle
Nicholas Budd, partner and head of the commodity trade finance practice group at White & Case in Paris gives an introduction and background to the world of field warehousing and the application of collateral management services in commodity financing transactions past and present.
Forfaiting rates 3.7
Indicative discount to yield rates (%) supplied by Standard Bank London.
LEGAL ISSUES:Appealing LC decision
Richard Gwynne and Sunil Ghadia, both partners at Stephenson Harwood in London, look at discounting of deferred payment letters of credit after the recent Court of Appeal ruling in Santander v Paribas.
Lending off the field
Field warehouse receipts: securing collateral for trade finance in emerging markets. Andre Soumah, executive chairman at Ace - Audit Control and Expertise Group in Geneva gives his perspective from a collateral management company angle.
YOUR SAY: Ask and answer the right question!
Dan Taylor is an able spokesman for the banking community. [He is president of the International Financial Services Association - Ed.] As such, it is not surprising that he advocates with gusto to provide banks with a minimum three day ‘safe harbour’ in which to consider demands for payments made under standby letters of credit (see ‘Your Say’, TFR, March 2000, p40). Moreover, there is nothing inherently unreasonable about that position. But it is incorrect to assert that the ‘safe harbour’ he advocates reflects either actual banking practice or the views of the UCP 500, the dominant regulatory scheme for the letter of credit transactions.
