ITFA Young Professionals – Martin Ashurst Mentorship Forum

Following the ITFA AGM in Edinburgh, ITFA is proud to announce that besides having two new Board Members joining the Board (Khilola Turaeva and Duarte Pedreira), there has also been some reshuffling of Board Member duties and responsibilities.

Duarte Pedreira will be heading the Young Professionals Programme and he is excited to kick off the Martin Ashurst Mentorship Forum. 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 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 this reason, we are approaching you, our members, for assistance with the development of this initiative by providing feedback on two specific points (kindly revert by sending an email to duarte.pedreira@crownagentsbank.com):

1. We would like to ask you to let us know who your Young Professionals are (trade finance members of staff), under the age of 35. A simple list with names and email addresses will suffice – this will enable the Young Professionals initiative to effectively target communication and initiatives;
2. We would also like to invite you to express your interest or nominees to join the Martin Ashurst Mentorship Forum either as mentors or mentees.

We look forward to hearing from you with the information requested so that this Mentorship Forum can reach its maximum potential with the aim of developing many “newcomers” to the industry. 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.

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.