Announcing the conference speakers and panelists, Bristol 2021, 6-8 October

There is just one week to go to this year’s edition of the 47th ITFA Annual Conference, which is being held between 6-8 October in Bristol. If you haven’t registered yet, please click here.

Moderated by Katharine Morton – TXF, another interesting panel session which will be held on Wednesday 6th October at 4:30pm is titled: Springboard or marking time? Prospects for stability and recovery in a post-pandemic world. Panelists include Alberto Amo – Santander Corporate & Investment Banking, James Binns -Barclays, Surath Sengupta – HSBC and Kazuo Yoshimura, SMBC.

These are strange times for global trade – with bounce backs, bullwhips and bubbles, stop and start, stockpiling, asymmetric government support and many mixed signals for physical trade. We join senior bankers actually seeing the flow of trade finance with a practical view of trade and supply chain assets. Where do they see opportunity and risk in global trade as we emerge from the pandemic? What’s froth, what’s not and what’s going to be the real state of play for global trade?

Alberto is globally responsible for the asset rotation strategy of all GTB assets and the PDM Structuring and channels as insurance and co investment agreements with institutional investors.

In his previous Trade Finance for Corporates role Alberto was leading different initiatives as the strategy to face the regulatory impact on the business and Capital optimization of GTB products.

His responsibilities included initiatives to adds credit and liquidity capacity to all asset classes, such as Trade Assets Securitizations like “Trade MAPS” and ECA Back Covered Bonds, among others.

On top of his roles in Santander, he served as member of the Advisory Board of the International Chamber of Commerce Banking Commission and the BAFT Global Trade Industry Council and the DG Expert Group of the World Trade Organization.

James Binns is the Global Head of Trade and Working Capital for Barclays Bank, which serves Corporate, NBFI and FI clients globally with teams located in UK, Europe, Americas, Asia and the Middle East.

Prior to joining Barclays, James spent 4.5 years at Deutsche Bank where he headed Working Capital Advisory and Trade Finance for EMEA and latterly Global Cross Product Solutions. This followed 20 years at HSBC where James was based across Asia Pacific, the Middle East, USA and UK in a number of senior Corporate Banking and Trade Finance roles.

Surath Sengupta is Managing Director, Global Trade & Receivables Finance at HSBC responsible for Portfolio Management, Distribution, Sustainability, Financial Institutions and Public Sector. His principal responsibilities include capital management and profitability of trade assets, managing distribution to a diverse investor base, and leading the strategies for both sustainable trade finance and financial institutions globally.

Prior to this role, Surath was the Head of Trade for HSBC India, and before that he held a multitude of other senior leadership roles across Global, Commercial and Transaction Banking. He is a Chartered Accountant, and has a degree with specialisation in Commerce. Surath loves travelling and is a passionate sampler of local cuisines.

Kazu Yoshimura is Managing Director and Global Head of Trade Finance at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.

He joined the former Sumitomo Bank in 1991. He is a seasoned trade finance banker with over 25 years’ experience in trade and structured finance in Tokyo, Singapore, Dubai, Seoul, New York, and London. He was appointed to his current position based in London in 2021 following previous roles as Region Head of Trade Finance Americas in New York until 2017 and Global Head of Supply Chain Finance in Tokyo until 2021.

He is a non-executive director of the Marco Polo Network.

Katharine is a financial content producer, presenter, writer, analyst and communicator with extensive knowledge of the world of international finance and risk. She has been Head of Trade, Treasury and Risk at Trade & Export Finance (TXF) since January 2018. She interviews, moderates and writes on financing international trade, export and project finance. Katharine was Editor in Chief of Trade & Forfaiting Review (TFR) in 2017. Prior to that she was Editorial Director at EuroFinance Conferences, part of the Economist Group. She edited Treasury Perspectives and has researched, written, chaired and moderated financial conferences worldwide. She has been a consultant on capital markets, and has edited on risk, economics, trade, environment and finance for Finance Asia and Euromoney, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. Katharine has a degree in economics from King’s College, Cambridge. She is also an exhibited artist.