Introducing the ITFA Conference Speakers – Stacey Facter and Paul Coles

The ITFA Board is delighted to announce that Stacey Facter and Paul Coles will be heading one of the sessions at the ITFA 44th Annual Trade and Forfaiting Conference which is taking place in Edinburgh, Scotland between the 6-8 September 2017.

For the last four years, Stacey Facter has been the Senior Vice President responsible for Trade Products at BAFT (Bankers Association for Finance and Trade), an affiliate of the American Bankers Association.  She has oversight of all trade-related advocacy, education and product-related initiatives for the association and its membership.  She participates in BAFT trade committees, product and regional councils as well as many other industry initiatives to advance the trade finance agenda of member institutions, including working toward standardizing trade definitions, documentation and regulations for industry adoption and consistent use. Stacey has more than twenty-five years of experience in international banking, including over twenty years with JP Morgan Chase Bank in sales, product, secondary market distribution and risk management covering emerging markets, international trade finance, cash and securities collateral management.

Stacey was credit trained at Irving Trust Company and holds an MBA in Finance and International Business from NYU’s Stern School of Business.

Paul Coles is responsible for overseeing the transactional distribution activity that supports HSBC’s GTRF business. His global role focuses on creating greater consistency in the processes, documentation and investor management, along with working with the regional teams on key multi-jurisdiction transactions.

Prior to joining HSBC, Paul was the global coordinator and EMEA head for trade risk distribution at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Paul has also worked in the trade credit distribution team at ABN AMRO, and subsequently at RBS as the trade asset management regional head for the NV business (part of the legacy ABN AMRO network). He started his career 20 years ago at London Forfaiting Company where he held a variety of trade finance roles.

Paul has a BSc in Management Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London and is a member of the Board of ITFA, where he currently chairs the Market Practice Committee.

At this year’s conference, Stacey and Paul will be briefing us on the BAFT Master Participation Agreement (MPA) revision; one of the hot topics in the market. This is a document that is now extensively used by many of our members in its two forms (English law and New York law), but as our industry has evolved, so too has the need to ensure that these templates reflect these changes and continue to facilitate our business.

We are therefore pleased to welcome to our conference Stacey Facter from BAFT, who is leading the current MPA update process. Stacey will be giving us an overview of what this entails and what the proposed modifications set out to achieve, and she will be joined by Paul Coles as chair of the ITFA Market Practice Committee to touch on a few other initiatives that are currently underway.

We look forward to welcoming Stacey and Paul in Edinburgh!