A little glitz and glamour last week!

On Wednesday evening, TTP hosted our Corporate Excellence Awards in London, and was great to see so many familiar faces and new faces from across the industry all come together to celebrate the exceptional work being done by corporates around the world. Chances are, most of us interacted with something made, moved or powered by one of the winning companies that day without giving it much thought, whether switching on a light, making a cup of tea, picking up a phone or reaching into the medicine cabinet. Congratulations to all of this year’s winners and thank you to everyone who joined us for a brilliant evening. You can meet the winners and learn more about what they’ve been working on in our special awards digest below.

At the same time, part of the TTP team swapped London evening wear for Nairobi, where we were on the ground with ICC Kenya and EBRD for the Advancing Digital Trade and Trade Finance in Kenya workshop. TTP was reporting live, with plenty more insights from Nairobi still to come.

Elsewhere this week, our slow read, based on our Breakfast club event from a few weeks back, looks at who lends to commodity borrowers when they don’t have a track record? It’s an interesting question and well worth the read. We also look at the choices shaping the future of global settlement, while from the studio, the first of our Studio conversations from Miami hits the airwaves with ICC DSI explaining why digital trade still isn’t scaling, and what needs to change.

As always, there’s plenty to read, watch, and learn.

Until next time — cheers to work worth celebrating.

— Carter Hoffman, Deputy Editor

Country of the Week: Kenya

Did you know that Kenya is one of the world’s great tea exporters? Its high-altitude growing regions and climate proved exceptionally well suited to the crop, despite it only being introduced there in the early 20th century. Since then, tea has developed into one of the country’s most important exports, much of it leaving Kenya through the port of Mombasa on its way to tea drinkers around the world.

Kenya trade stats (2024):

Slow Read

Who lends to commodity borrowers without a track record?

By: Geoffrey Wynne

Nobody in the room argued that capital was scarce. The disagreement was over who can get at it.

Eleanor Hill, treasury editor at TTP, welcomed guests to the breakfast, hosted with Sullivan & Worcester. Geoff Wynne, who moderated, opened by looking ahead to the rest of 2026 and beyond.

Resilience costs working capital

Tanya Epshteyn, head of structured and trade finance at Czarnikow Group, said businesses had spent decades optimising supply chains for efficiency. Covid, the war in Ukraine and disruption in the Red Sea changed the calculation.

Companies now hold more stock, use more than one supplier and maintain alternative logistics routes. All of it consumes cash.

Czarnikow supplies food and beverage ingredients to multinationals, so the inventory it carries can be what keeps a customer’s production line running.

“The cost of resilience is not measured in basis points for SMEs,” Epshteyn said. “It is measured in working capital and its availability.”

Bank regulation can make that money harder to obtain. Products deemed illiquid become less attractive; structured trade requires collateral monitoring; monitoring requires infrastructure and staff. A viable SME trade can become too expensive for a bank to finance.

Epshteyn argued for lending against the trade instead. In receivables finance, the buyer’s credit strength can support the funding. Inventory finance can use warehouse receipts and controlled stock. A borrowing base can combine the two.

Technology helps when it gives lenders better information about inventory and collateral.

“The cheapest source of liquidity is often improved transparency,” she said.

She expects supply chains to become more regional and inventory to be treated less as an inefficiency. Both require funding. SMEs, meanwhile, need better reporting, management information and inventory visibility if they want lenders to finance them.

Lenders want control

Wynne invited James Lowrey, managing director and head of trade and working capital product at Lloyds Bank, to shoot the argument down. Lowrey declined.
His concern is control. Commodity traders have grown enormously, he said, and the largest can now compete directly with the banks financing them. They borrow cheaply through facilities such as revolving credit facilities, then deploy the money elsewhere at much higher margins.

Lowrey said know-your-customer checks should therefore mean more than compliance. A bank needs to understand the customer, its counterparties and its trades, including what the customer will do when circumstances deteriorate.

He separates ability to pay from willingness to pay.

Then came his three rules. “Control is happiness”: control the cash flows and the security, and make sure that security is perfected. “Verify, verify, verify”: the customer, its systems and its counterparties. And third: “Pay me back. Using language my mum would understand.” Lowrey wants to know the second, third and fourth exits if the first fails. “Without authentication you are not lending money,” he said. “You are betting money.”

AI and better data should make it easier to establish where financed goods are, whether on a vessel, in a port or in a warehouse. Lowrey still wants people to check.

“Nothing beats going to see and touch what you have financed on the regular,” he said.

“The world is flush with liquidity,” Lowrey said. Much of it is chasing the same group of large borrowers, weakening terms for the companies that need protection least.

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