CHAIRMAN’S MESSAGE – Sean Edwards, ITFA Chairman / Head of Legal and Special Adviser to the Global Trade Finance Department at SMBC, Feb 2023

Dear Members and Friends,

What a great month for ITFA and its partners.

We kicked off events in Tallinn, where together with Andre Casterman, I represented ITFA during the ITFA-SupplierPlus SCF Summit 2023. During this summit, our second in Tallinn, we discussed the potential use of digital negotiable instruments (such as electronic bills of exchange) with irrevocable payment undertakings and the new SCF accounting rules. As I write this introduction, Chris Hall, Lorna Pillow, Simon Cook, Andre and myself had the pleasure of attending the GTR MENA Regional Conference.  Lorna and I set out our new rules for the sale of digital debt instruments, the Uniform Rules of Transferable Payment Obligations (URTEPO) including their part in helping to (re)create the forfaiting markets, with Andre and Chris tackling Fintech and Insurance respectively. From an ITFA perspective, the highlight of this conference was the ITFA sponsored networking event we hosted at the end of Day One. This ITFA exclusive session provided the perfect environment for us to catch up with current and future members, and to present our 49^th Annual Conference which will be held in Abu Dhabi, between the 11^th and the 13^th October.

On to March, our traditional NERC winter event to be hosted on 1^st March, will start off a month packed with activities. This will be followed on 9^th March by an Emerging Leaders Evening, with the inaugural Trade and Investment Forum, organised in conjunction with BCR, aimed at non-bank investors taking place during the day. Both of these will be held in the City of London.  On the 15^th March we have two regional committee events: the SERC Education Event in Spain, mirrored on the other side of the world by the ANZRC Supply Chain Industry Summit in Sydney, Australia.  We will close the month with our annual Bowling and Jass Championship event organised in collaboration with VEFI in Switzerland. 

I am thrilled to also announce that during March, ITFA will be participating in GTR Cape Town.

For more details about these events and future ones, I invite you to access the calendar of events on our website https://itfa.org/category/itfa-events-2023/

In this February edition of the ITFA Newsletter we report on our recent events in Zurich and publish a summary of the SCF Tallinn Summit contributed by SupplierPlus. You will also find interesting articles about Russia by KCS Group Europe and on African Trade by PANGEA RISK.

Lastly, we are proud to welcome the following new members to ITFA: Atlantic Risk Management Services (AtlanticRMS), Contour, National Credit Insurance (Brokers) Pty Ltd, Rebeccanomics and TradeRiver.

We look forward to hearing from you with any feedback you may want to share with us by sending an email to myself, any of the Board Members or to our general email, info@itfa.org.

Best wishes

Sean Edwards