🌟 Editor's note

Editor’s Note | Week of 24 November 2025

By Carter Hoffman

We finally did it! The 2026 TTP Awards are officially live. After months of planning, calibrating categories, coordinating judges, writing criteria, rewriting criteria, deleting criteria, and writing more criteria, the doors are now officially open.

If you haven’t already seen it, the nominations page is up and ready for you to apply or nominate someone deserving for any of the 36 categories. These awards are our way of celebrating the practitioners who show up every day to solve problems for this industry and make an impact on real people. We can’t wait to read the submissions.

But this week wasn’t just about confetti and press releases. Not even close.

Our Slow Read this week goes deep into the world of tariffs, exploring how protectionism is reshaping both trade flows and risk decisions across supply chains. It’s based on insights from the webinar we ran with Aon and AMCI last week, featuring legal, commodity, and risk experts who pulled apart the consequences of using emergency powers as a trade tool. Spoiler: the implications are enormous.

In the day-to-day market updates, we covered everything from project and resource risk to shifting corporate sentiment in HSBC’s latest Global Trade Pulse, transparency reforms in export finance, and the opening of TF COP 2025 in London. Over in payments and digital assets, HSBC’s move into tokenised deposits in the US and UAE gave us plenty to unpack, and so did the latest treasury-tech upgrades from China’s CIPS, Trustly, and UBS/Ant International.

For those of us who prefer watching and listening to reading, our multimedia content this week has been focused on the TF COP event that took place in London on Friday. In the build-up to the event, we hosted a podcast with the EBRD and the IFC looking at ways to close the trade finance gap. We also released a series of short reels that we recorded on the ground, looking at FX shortages, local-currency realities, and what’s actually working for SMEs. Be sure to check them out!

And we’re not done for 2025 just yet! There’s plenty more in store before the year winds to a close.

Until next time — Apply for our awards!

— The TTP Editorial Team

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Slow Read

How protectionism is reshaping trade and risk decisions

By: Carter Hoffman

For most of the modern era, tariffs have been a background factor for many in global trade. Over the course of 2025, however, they have become the top issue for nearly every operator in the space.

That is why Aon Credit Solutions, the American Metal Supply Chain Institute (AMCI) and Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) hosted the “Navigating Tariffs, Trade and Risk” webinar.

During the session, moderator Kim Cordero, Deputy US Practice Leader at Aon, spoke with Lawrence Hanson, of counsel at Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg; José Gasca, co-founder of ME Trading and chair of AMCI; Ricardo Berisso, senior steel merchant at Cargill; and David Culotta, senior risk executive and chief underwriting officer at Coface North America

The legal foundations of today’s tariff landscape

The first step in navigating tariffs is understanding where they come from. As Larry Hanson reminded the audience, nothing about the core legal tools is new. What has changed is the way they are being deployed.

Section 301 tariffs began as a response to intellectual property violations in China, but “that has now expanded to, frankly, all things China,” Hanson explained. Section 201 of the Trade Act targets very specific product groups, such as solar panels and washing machines, while Section 232 has become the “most popular tool” in recent years because it allows the president to impose tariffs on national security grounds with broad discretion.

The most contentious development, however, has been the use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). This statute dates back to 1977, with roots in the earlier Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. It was not drafted with tariff policy in mind. Yet, as Hanson explained, “in the last year… he’d been using the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA, as a basis for additional tariffs, as a weapon, if you will”.

The Supreme Court is now considering whether the president has gone too far. The case turns on two questions. First, can a loosely defined “emergency” trigger such sweeping powers for tariffs under IEEPA? Second, does that interpretation erode the constitutional role of Congress in controlling the power of the purse?

Hanson noted that earlier in the process, he “would have bet a year ago that this is an absolute done deal” against the tariffs, because IEEPA “has never been used before like this ever”, and the constitutional questions are so fundamental. Today, given the current composition of the court and a historical precedent from the Nixon era, he is less certain. That earlier case involved a temporary 10% tariff used to stabilise the currency under the old Trading with the Enemy Act. It could offer cover for upholding presidential authority, even though, as he pointed out, IEEPA “was designed to limit the power of the president rather than expand the power of the president”.

For trade finance and credit professionals, the outcome matters in very practical ways. If the tariffs are struck down, the question becomes how any refunds would be handled, over what period and subject to what conditions. Hanson outlined three possible paths: a traditional administrative protest process at customs, automatic refunds once illegality is confirmed, or a specific appropriation by Congress. None is straightforward at the scale involved.

There is also no guarantee that a legal defeat on IEEPA would end tariff pressure. The president “has other weapons in his arsenal”, including Sections 301, 201 and 232, as well as “even more obscure” statutes, Hanson added.

Beyond the courtroom, Hanson painted a wider picture of a strained global trading system. The post-war attempt to manage trade tensions through common rules has weakened. He noted that the World Trade Organization’s appellate body “essentially does not exist” because there are not enough judges. If a party appeals, “there’s no appeal, because they don’t have the mechanics”. At the same time, unilateral tariffs are increasingly used as leverage, with the president ultimately saying: “We’re going to have these tariffs, unless you negotiate with me”.

Trade digest

Treasury, payment and global banking digest

🗓️ Upcoming events

Multimedia from Trade Treasury Payments

🚀 Our latest edition

Did You Know? 

Deep tier supply chain data can reduce SME financing rejection rates by up to one third. When lenders gain visibility beyond the primary buyer, seeing real delivery patterns, inventory movements and payment behaviours, they can price risk on actual performance rather than assumptions. The same information that moves through logistics networks every day can become a live credit signal, unlocking working capital for firms that would otherwise be invisible to the financial system.

Till next time,

Trade Treasury Payments (TTP)