Martin Ashurst Trade Finance Mentorship Forum – Call for Mentors

First and foremost, the ITFA Board would like you wish you a Happy New Year and all the very best for 2016.

As announced during our AGM in Dubai earlier this year, and further reinforced during the Christmas Cocktail Party in London, ITFA is committed to ensuring Trade Finance as a key enabler of world trade is portrayed as an attractive and exciting career path. As such, we have set up the Martin Ashurst Trade Finance Mentorship Forum.

Martin Ashurst was a Trade Financier and a Forfaiter. Throughout his exemplary career he not only contributed to the success of numerous trade finance teams, but also to the personal development of many “newcomers” to the industry. He set the standard through his ethics and principles, being a role model for many. Unfortunately Martin left us in 2014. Nevertheless the values he stood for still remain and inspired us to use our reach and membership base to continue towards ensuring we have a trade finance industry that is seen as an accessible, exciting and inspiring career option for aspiring members of our industry.

The Mentorship Forum works by matching industry mentors with a diverse range of mentees, who have an interest in discovering trade finance, and who might be students, professionals from other industries, or even professionals from our membership base who are not yet engaged in trade finance. The mentees will be sourced by nominations from members, or centrally by ITFA (in collaboration with universities in members’ jurisdictions, for example).

We have designed the programme in a way that does not demand an excessive commitment from our mentors. Each mentee selected into the programme is normally given two discussions with a mentor, each lasting no more than 60 minutes over the course of 6 to 8 weeks:

•       the first discussion is structured to give the mentee the opportunity to introduce him/herself to the mentor and to hear from the mentor a description of his own career path, as well as of the industry and its structure, modus operandi, etc. The mentor should encourage the mentee to develop further research of the industry ahead of the second call;
•       the second discussion is focused on career paths and opportunities and link into how a mentee should best position him/herself in the market for the selected career path (qualifications available, ways of self-development, networking and conference events, etc).

The programme also brings to life a number of other value-added benefits to mentees, such as the access to an HR Partner for advice on HR-related matters (a recruitment professional specialised in the Trade Finance industry), availability of a pool of area specialists (front/middle/back office, credit, legal, compliance, etc) and invites to some ITFA and ITFA-member led events, amongst others.

For the Mentorship Forum to be a success we need mentors from a wide range of backgrounds within trade finance and we need nominations of mentees who would benefit from this. The ITFA Board would like to invite you to express your interest or nominees to join this exciting new initiative by sending an email to chris.hall@itfa.org.

This would be an invaluable contribution to our industry going forward and we would like to thank you in advance for any time you are able to give.