Structured trade finance

Structured Trade Finance (STF) is a specialised activity dedicated to the financing of high value commodity flows.

STF transactions are structured around the supply chain and commercial terms of customers, usually involving large bilateral strategic relationships.

STF techniques are used largely in the commodity sector by producers, processors, traders and industrial end-users, and include:

warehouse financing (finance of commodity inventories)
borrowing base financing (finance of working capital assets on a revolving basis)
tolling/processing (finance the conversion or processing of raw commodities into value added products)
pre-export (prepayment) finance (medium to longer term requirements)
reserve based lending.

Each financing arrangement is tailored to the particular needs of the client. Repayment of STF transactions is made through the sale/export proceeds of the commodity and can be used to finance short term working capital or long term capital expenditure up to five years.

A comprehensive offering

Our STF team focuses primarily on “upstream” financing of cross-border commodity flows and limited recourse trade finance in order to:

enhance the credit rating of the facility beyond that of the borrower
mitigate the cross border and country risk
produce a transaction where the whole proposition is more resilient than the sum of its parts.

Benefits for the customer include: