🌟 Editor's note

Editor’s Note | Week of 26 January 2025

By Carter Hoffman

We’ve officially launched the latest edition of our magazine, Fault Lines, and we’re genuinely proud of this one. It’s packed with perspectives that promise to change how you look at the pressure points across trade, treasury, and payments. If you haven’t flipped through it yet, consider this your nudge - it’s free to download (link below).

As if a big magazine launch wasn’t enough, this coming week is also TTP Awards week! We couldn’t be more excited (and maybe a little nervous, this is our inaugural Awards event after all) to enjoy an evening with a view of the New York City skyline, celebrating some of the incredible work that our industry has done. We’re counting down to Thursday and putting the final touches on what’s shaping up to be a great evening. Stay tuned to see who takes home the honours.

But wait, there’s more! We couldn’t let the day-to-day slip through the cracks even in the middle of all this excitement, so we’ve kept ourselves busy on the editorial side too. We covered everything from the India–EU “mother of all deals” and the role of standards in digital trade to SME finance in Africa, trade-based money laundering risks, and the steady return of inventory finance. We also spent some time at PANGEA-Risk’s Insight 2026 event in London, where we had a chance to cut through the noise with their CEO, Robert Besseling, in search of opportunities in emerging and frontier markets. There is a link to that video below.

Plenty to read, plenty to watch, and plenty to celebrate.

Until next time — see you at the awards.

— The TTP Editorial Team

Skip to your favourite part

• Slow Read

• Foreword to our latest magazine: Fault Lines

• Trade digest

• Treasury, payment and global banking digest

• 🗓️ Upcoming events

• 🚀 Our latest edition

Slow Read

Foreword to our latest magazine: Fault Lines

It is hard to make sense of the world by looking at current events alone.

Of course, events draw attention, but more often than not, they don’t give a complete understanding of the forces that brought them about. And it tends to be those underlying conditions that tell the real story.

We’ve called this edition Fault Lines because, when we look out at the world today, we see one where many different forces have no choice but to exist together, even as the strain between them grows.

Fault lines are long cracks in the Earth’s crust where large blocks of rock meet and slowly move against each other over time. They form because the Earth’s surface is always in motion, with enormous plates pressing, sliding, or pushing past one another, even though this movement is far too slow to notice day to day.

Where these plates meet, the rock stays in contact, and stress builds along the boundary as the plates continue to move. That stress can build for many years, sometimes centuries, until the rocks shift slightly and release energy, which is often what causes an earthquake. Fault lines, therefore, mark places where pressure naturally gathers because different movements have to co-exist along the same seam.

The same idea helps explain what is happening across trade, treasury, and payments today. Large forces continue to move simultaneously, shaped by different priorities and moving at different speeds. The shared boundaries where these forces meet comprise the fault lines of our industry.

For example, countries are trading more with each other than ever before, with businesses today relying on long supply chains that cross many borders. But at the same time, those borders seem to be becoming increasingly more prevalent, with more rules, checks, and tariffs lengthening the psychological distance between trading partners.

The same thing happens with the tools we use. Older systems are still deployed because they are stable and trusted, while newer tools promise faster payments, better data, and constant access. Since both old and new tools are used side by side, pressure builds where they connect and overlap.

It can be easy to think of fault lines as dangerous places because, for many of us, they only really enter our consciousness during the most extreme events. As a result, they become closely associated with moments of destruction and loss of control.

But those are the exception to the norm. Most of the time, fault lines are simply there. They are something to be aware of, certainly, but not something to fear in and of themselves. The pressure they hold does not cause harm on its own. What matters is noticing when that pressure starts to change, and understanding what those changes might be telling us.

The chapters and articles throughout this edition of our magazine aim to do just that, by tracing how that pressure is moving in the system. The ‘Treasury’ chapter, for example, explores how firms are managing (or at least attempting to manage) that pressure internally, through liquidity, risk, and FX decisions. The chapters on ‘Payments’ and ‘Technology’ examine some of the infrastructure pressures and how they are changing around us.

The chapter on ‘Defence Finance and Geopolitics’ takes a wider view of the world as it stands today to attempt to better understand some of the macro pressures we face, while the ‘Credit, Risk, and Capacity’ chapter explores how banks and corporates respond when those pressures reach balance sheets and the limits of risk sharing.

As you read through these pages, we hope that they draw your attention to the points in many different systems where the forces at play may be moving away from a stable state of coexistence, and towards something more dangerous. The earthquake-esque disruptions that we need time to prepare to defend against.

With this magazine, we aren’t trying to predict when these faults will rupture or the impact that the resulting slip will have, but we are inviting you to notice those signals. To look at the systems you work within and ask where pressure is gathering and where assumptions are being tested.

In that sense, we are all seismologists now, watching for the small signals and shifts that are a sign of larger changes to come.

Welcome to Fault Lines.

Trade digest

Treasury, payment and global banking digest

🗓️ Upcoming events

Multimedia from Trade Treasury Payments

🚀 Our latest edition

Did You Know? 

More than 60% of global cross border trade still settles using infrastructure designed over 40 years ago, even as transaction volumes, compliance demands, and data expectations have multiplied.

This coexistence of legacy rails and modern real time systems is one of the key fault lines in today’s trade and payments ecosystem. While new platforms promise speed, transparency, and programmability, they often rely on or must interoperate with older systems built for a very different scale and risk environment.

The result is not just operational friction, but latent liquidity pressure, as delays, reconciliation gaps, and fragmented standards quietly lock up working capital across supply chains.

In today’s market, liquidity constraints are less about capital availability and more about how efficiently trust, data, and settlement move through the system.

Trade Treasury Payments (TTP)