Global merchandise trade is cooling off, says the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) November 2025 Goods Trade Barometer. This indicator provides direction of worldwide merchandise trade ahead of the official data release.
As of September 2025, the indicator stood at 101.8, above the baseline trend value of 100. This is a decrease from 102.7 in October 2024, as trade is expanding slowly due to ongoing tariffs and policy uncertainty.

The UK has officially released it’s much anticipated Autumn Budget, confirming around £30bn of net fiscal tightening, overwhelmingly through tax rises and largely front-loaded into 2026.
Markets had expected a tax-led adjustment, but the scale and early timing have surprised many, especially against an OBR outlook that shows UK trade intensity stuck about 15% below pre-Brexit levels, weak medium-term growth, and a current-account deficit hovering near 3–3.5% of GDP.

The UK government has introduced a new financial guarantee through UK Export Finance (UKEF) to bolster the critical minerals supply chain for UK businesses. The Critical Goods Export Development Guarantee (Critical Goods EDG) helps companies access financing to secure long-term import contracts or expand domestic production.
This initiative follows the government’s Critical Minerals Strategy and targets minerals like lithium, aluminium, and rare earth elements. 

Emerging Europe is experiencing significant demographic headwinds. Fertility rates have fallen well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, averaging around 1.5. This decline is driven by delayed childbearing, changing social norms, economic uncertainties, and evolving family structures, says the EBRD’s latest Transition Report 2025-26: Brave Old World, launched today. 

On 26 November 2025, Singapore’s Court of Appeal provided an answer with a judgment that will resonate well beyond the country’s legal community. In Avra International DMCC v Dava Pte Ltd [2025] SGCA 53, the Court was asked a deceptively simple question about a shipment of Indonesian steam coal aboard the MV Milos: when a judge orders cargo to be sold in aid of arbitration, how and when can that order be challenged on appeal? TTP obtained and reviewed the Court of Appeal’s judgment in full; what follows is our analysis of its reasoning and commercial implications.

🔸Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) CEO Eddie Yue Wai-man emphasised the need to strengthen regional financial integration amid tariff shocks, disrupted supply chains, and heightened market volatility.

🔸FG Capital Advisors, a New York-based corporate finance advisory firm, has expanded its private trade finance platform that structures, underwrites, and privately places trade and working capital facilities.

🔸British International Investment (BII), the UK’s development finance institution, and FirstRand, one of Africa’s largest financial institutions, have launched a $150 million financing facility to support Transition Finance projects across Africa.

🔸Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), the continent’s leading infrastructure solutions provider, has secured a US$75 million term loan facility from the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA).

🔸The African Development Fund has approved a $14.64 million grant through its Climate Action Window to support Project 2 of the Programme to Strengthen Resilience to Food and Nutrition Insecurity in the Sahel (P2-P2RS).

On 26th November 2025, S&P Global Ratings downgraded Tether’s stablecoin USDT to a “5 (weak)” rating, the lowest possible, from the previous “4 (constrained)” rating. This change reflects Tether’s increased investment in risky assets and ongoing issues with transparency and disclosure. 

On 22 November 2025, the industry crossed a line that has been approaching for nearly a decade. The coexistence period between SWIFT’s legacy MT messages and ISO 20022 has formally ended, and ISO 20022 is now the mandatory standard for cross-border payments and reporting. 

🔸Canada’s banking regulator has opened a 90-day consultation in Ottawa on proposed revisions to the Capital Adequacy Requirements (CAR) Guideline, the framework that determines how banks calculate regulatory capital for credit, market and operational risk. The review comes at a moment when funding conditions are tight across global markets and supervisors are reassessing whether capital requirements still reflect the economic substance of different exposures. 

🔸TD Bank surveyed 246 treasury professionals at the 2025 Association for Financial Professionals conference, finding that 80% still rely on manual or fragmented systems, which remain their biggest challenge alongside macroeconomic uncertainty and market volatility.

🔸RTGS.global has expanded its cross-border payments platform by adding 23 new currencies, enabling instantaneous settlement between participating financial institutions through a single API connection.

🔸According to the latest Kaspersky and VDC Research, ransomware attacks on manufacturing organisations worldwide could have caused over $18 billion in losses during the first three quarters of 2025.

🔸The Ministry of Economy and Finance, Bank of Korea, National Pension Service (NPS), and Ministry of Health and Welfare have formed a consultative task force to stabilise the won-dollar exchange rate amid rising market uncertainty.

🔸Cross River Bank has launched a stablecoin payments offering integrated with its real-time core system, COS, unifying fiat and stablecoin flows within a single interoperable platform.

Navigating complexity, driving innovation
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The FT Live Global Banking Summit brings together senior executives, policymakers, and innovators to map out the future of financial services.
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Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) spoke with Robert Besseling, CEO of Pangea Risk and a member of TTP’s Global Advisory Panel, about the impact of tariffs and shifting trade dynamics on emerging and frontier markets.

At Trade Treasury Payments (TTP), we often talk about the building blocks of a modern trade-tech stack. But few conversations crystallise the interplay between compliance, speed, and implementation quite as clearly as this discussion with Przemek Luniewski, Chief Technology Officer at Secro.

In an environment where small and medium sized enterprises remain constrained by limited access to working capital, Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) and the International Trade and Forfaiting Association (ITFA) convened senior trade, banking and insurance professionals at the ITFA Annual Conference in Singapore for a 30 minute challenge to rethink SME trade finance.