ITFA EL Competition – Judging

Despite this most unusual year, ITFA as the global trade finance industry body has continued to demonstrate its commitment to the industry, our members, and of course, the emerging leaders in trade finance. As such, following the very successful launch of the Emerging Trade Financier Award last year when we had 11 different projects submitted for the jury to consider, this year’s edition proved to be even more successful.

Over the course of the last few months, and benefitting from a submission deadline extension and an agreement with the TFG’s (Trade Finance Global) International Trade Professionals Programme to accept their top ranked projects as eligible to enter the ITFA competition, we received 19 high quality submissions in total.

A lot of effort was put into every single submission and the nominated jury, chaired by GTR’s editor in chief Shannon Manders, had a very difficult task in shortlisting the best. A decision was nevertheless reached and the shortlisted submissions are as follows:

• A New Institutional Asset Class in Trade Finance? by Alejandro Battistotti                          
• Whitepaper: Microfinance-based Trade Solution to Remove Credit Risk Constraints for Banks & Support SME Trade in Unstable Times by Alex Mearing
• In the era of digitalization – software export support by selected ECAs and suggestions thereof by Didem Erdogan           
• A guide to Trade Finance Law by Julian Heaven                             
• The life cycle of a Trade (Video format) by Texel                            

The quality of the submissions was such, that the panel of jurors felt it had also to raise a special mention to the submission entitled Negotiable Instruments are going through a makeover – the who, what, where, why by Mohamed Elnaggar.

What next?

All the shortlisted authors (plus the special mention) are now invited to deliver a short presentation of their submission at a webinar being hosted by ITFA on Friday 16 October. The webinar will be free to attend for ITFA members and Emerging Leaders and all those in attendance will then be invited to vote electronically for their selected submission. Details will soon follow on this webinar.

The winner will then be announced during the ITFA AGM, which will take place later in the year.

Once again thank you very much to all the Emerging Leaders who have produced extremely good quality submissions, and to all the ITFA members in general for the support given to this initiative.