Media Appearances

via Trade Finance Global by Tania Ahmed

• Transaction banking is becoming increasingly technology-driven, with banks expected to embed directly into client operations and act as a central hub for diverse financial services.
• Despite rapid innovation in areas such as AI, real-time payments, and APIs, the industry faces ongoing tension between modern digital solutions and legacy systems that must continue to coexist.
• Future progress depends on collaboration, interoperability, and attracting new talent.

Read the full article here.

via Trade Finance Global by Vanessa Manning and Mahika Ravi Shankar

• Long-term innovation involves identifying emerging growth trends early, particularly in regions like South-East Asia.
• Banks must adopt customer-led, incremental innovation to meet increasing demands for speed, efficiency, and real-time capabilities.
• The principle of kaizen, or continuous improvement, underpins modern banking strategy, emphasising gradual refinement, transparency, and close alignment with client needs in Japanese banking.

What does it mean for innovation to be long-term? It requires seeing growth corridors and rises in wealth before they have fully been realised. But this far-sightedness is not prophesying – it’s merely knowing where to look.

Just 10 to 15 years ago, the prominence of an affluent middle class – a modern bourgeoisie – was not a feature often attributed to emerging markets in South-East Asia. But the telltale signs were there. Intra-regional trade in Asia stood at 54% of the value of Asia’s total trade in 2000, a figure which increased to 57% in 2022. For most other regions, intra-regional trade decreased. 

Intra-Asian trade needs to be financed. Multinational banks must be positioned within regional financial architecture, building local partnerships to capture future flows rather than react to them. Over a decade ago, Japanese bank MUFG formed partnerships with Bank Danamon in Indonesia, Bank of Ayudhya (or Krungsri) in Thailand, Delta in Vietnam, and Security Bank in the Philippines. 

Now, the region is “young, mobile, and cross-border oriented,” according to Vanessa Manning, EMEA Head of Transaction Banking at MUFG. Speaking to Trade Finance Global (TFG) at the 2026 BAFT Europe Forum, Manning elaborated on the relationship which Japanese banks tend to form with clients and banking partners alike to make money flow, and how they navigate trends facing the industry. The key takeaway is that this navigation must happen in sync with clients.

Read the full article here.

via Trade Finance Global by Deepa Sinha, Martin Cannings, Mahika Ravi Shankar, and Silvia Andreoletti

• Stablecoins are fully backed digital assets that provide stable value, enabling near real-time, cost-efficient cross-border payments on blockchain networks.
• Their most effective use cases lie in sectors with high payment friction, such as remittances, commodity trading, and interbank liquidity transfers.
• Regulatory clarity and interoperability between systems will be critical to unlocking stablecoins’ long-term adoption and integration into global banking.

Fully transparent, programmable, secure digital money that maintains a stable value: 20 years ago, stablecoins sounded about as realistic as flying cars and holograms. But recent technological advancements and regulatory innovation have made this once-distant dream a reality, turning it into one of banking’s hottest topics.

However, as with much almost too-good-to-be-true tech, it can be hard to separate hype from substance. And the more hype, the further from the fundamentals we stray. For the first episode of Trade Finance Global’s (TFG) new podcast series with BAFT, Banking on the Present, Mahika Ravi Shankar, Deputy Editor at TFG, sat down with Deepa Sinha, Senior Vice President, Payments & Financial Crimes, and Women in Transaction Banking, and Martin Cannings, Co-Chair of Payments, at BAFT, to dissect the stablecoin: what they are, who they’re for, and where they’re really headed.

Listen to the full episode here.

via Global Trade Review by Jacob Atkins

US banking regulators have proposed maintaining the current capital treatment of key trade finance products as part of the country’s adoption of the latest tranche of Basel reforms.  

If the proposals unveiled on March 19 are implemented, trade-related contingent instruments with a maturity of one year or less will retain a 20% credit conversion factor (CCF), which denotes how much capital must be held against a given exposure. 

Transaction-related contingent items with a maturity of more than one year, such as performance standby letters of credit, performance bonds and bid bonds, will retain a CCF of 50%.   

Read the full article here.