Trade Finance Operations
The merchants, who normally are the perfect targets for the private banking departments, mainly care about the standards of trade finance services. It is the bank that masters the trade services is the one that always wins the merchants' businesses. For this reason, global banks have made their trade service departments their utmost priority. Today credit executives have seized to sell credit (Loans and ODs), in fact loans and ODs are merely used as inducements to attract new relationships with merchants who utilize trade finance products.
Unlike any other banking products, the LC is deemed to be one unit. The simplest of discrepancies can lead to the loss of the total value of the LC.
LCs operations are mighty complex, and so meticulous to the extent that all banks exert rigorous efforts to create an operational environment conducive to achieving optimum efficiency, full control and exemplary customer service. Adopting the international standard banking practice as instituted by the ICC is a prerequisite to initiating competitive service that will enable local and regional banks to compete against banks such as the HSBC, CitiBank, Standard Chartered…etc. A SYSTEM OF OPERATIONS that constitutes of numerous components is what needed to reach the desired standards.
In this context, I would point out that we, at JSCS, are specialized in this technical field. We can literally create a trade finance center that operates at standards parallel to the standards adopted by top international banks in any where in the world.
1. Setting proper organizational structure (Centralization of Operations).
2. Introducing the bank's instruction manual (BIM) that contains the bank's policies, procedures, issuance guidelines, advising guidelines, limits of authority, relative circulars and notes for general circulation.
3. Setting a systematic method with qualitative measurement tools to evaluate LC's confirmation requests (credit and operational risk management).
4. Placing procedures for discounting bills.
5. Introducing NEW TRADE FINANCE PRODUCTS.
6. Training schedule to cover all your Trade Finance technical training needs.
I wish to reiterate that trade finance is the richest source of income for the bank. In commercial banking, a well organized trade finance division is the sole path for continuity and growth.
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