ITFA Annual Conference – Announcing the Main Speaker – Mr. Jean Craven

The ITFA Board is delighted to announce that Mr. Jean Craven, CEO – Barak Fund Management, will be the key-note speaker at this year’s ITFA Annual Conference in Cape Town, South Africa.

Jean has more than 18 years of experience in building and managing commodity trading businesses at leading South African financial institutions. His commodities business was one of the first active participants in the South African Commodity Futures Exchange and Jean served on the South African Futures Exchange advisory panel for many years. Prior to co-founding Barak with Prieur, Jean built and led a new team at Standard Bank that covered structured commodity finance, physical and derivative trading as well as agricultural and bio-fuel project finance.

Previously, Jean worked for Rand Merchant Bank (of the First Rand Group) heading up a team that completed the world’s first successful one billion US dollar grain securitization. This same team also set up the third largest crop insurance company in Africa to mitigate weather risk on farmer production loans for the First Rand Retail Bank.

Jean holds an accounting degree from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.

At the Conference, Jean will talk about building a Trade Finance business in Africa: from humble beginnings to building one of Africa’s largest trade finance funds. It’s all about getting the right team on-board to navigate shark invested waters, one step at a time and trusting your gut to find solutions and think out of the box. The key differentiator is identifying and pursuing the opportunities when you are swimming against the tide. The story of an African entrepreneur.

We look forward to welcoming Mr. Jean Craven in Cape Town, and we look forward to seeing you all soon.