Fintech focus in Cape Town – Trade as an Investable Asset Class

Trade finance is a reliable and low risk asset class and should be looked upon favourably by regulators, industry stakeholders and institutional investors.”, said Daniel Schmand, Chair of the ICC Banking Commission and Global Head of Trade Finance at Deutsche Bank.

Whether you are looking at selling down or investing in trade assets, new trading platforms – also called “fintech” platforms – will help you achieve your balance sheet management objectives and investment strategies.

Want to know more? Join us in Cape Town and discover world-class Fintechs that are helping the industry establish trade as an investable asset class. You will get detailed presentations and 1:1 demos from C-level fintech representatives. Focus is on ITFA-registered platforms collaborating with banks by embedding advanced capabilities such as trading workflows, data analytics as well as machine learning.

You will hear from four platform providers: TradeAssets, Tradeteq, Toredo and LiquidX. Agenda features the following ITFA Chairs and members:

•    Sean Edwards, Chair ITFA
•    Paul Coles, Chair ITFA Market Practice Committee
•    André Casterman, Chair ITFA Fintech Committee
•    TradeAssets by Sumit Roy, Chief Marketing Officer, TradeAssets
•    Tradeteq by Nils Behling, Co-Founder and CFO, Tradeteq
•    Toredo by Chris Hall, Senior Underwriter Global Financial Risks, Liberty Specialty Markets
•    LiquidX by Johanna Wissing, Diector, LiquidX

You will have two opportunities to hear from them, either on Tuesday 4 September from 14:00 till 17:30 and/or on Thursday 6 September from 14:00 till 17:30. There is no need to sign up as attendance is free of charge for all ITFA conference delegates. Venue details are available on line.

Sean Edwards, Chair of the ITFA and Head of Legal EMEA at SMBC is confident about the promising impacts of the fintech market trend: “Fear is rapidly dissipating from the bank-fintech model and a potentially beautiful relationship is in the offing as banks are increasingly seeking new investors as partners in the trade space, particularly on the funded side. This is a critical area of interest for the ITFA membership and our new ITFA Fintech committee is helping our membership navigate through those new technology propositions.”

“Trade Finance is becoming a collaborative economy as many banks want to move to an originate-to- distribute model and involve additional liquidity providers to increase their funding capacity. New fintech players make this happen in a very efficient way as they operate innovative market places involving all required transaction-level participants. Those community-based platforms already demonstrated that they offer promising avenues to help address the huge SME financing gap”, concludes André Casterman, Chair of the ITFA Fintech Committee and CMO at INTIX.

We look forward to welcoming you in Cape Town and surfing the fintech wave together. If you wish to warm up to those sessions, here is our suggested pre-reading article entitled “Innovate or lose out: how collaborating with fintechs benefits trade banks, their clients and their investors”.

(*) A total of 10 fintech software/platform providers joined the ITFA recently: Mitigram, Levantor Capital, INTIX, CCRManager, TradeAssets, Tradeteq, TrustBills, Trade.IX, LiquidX and Demica.