CFOs Weigh Trade Finance Innovations From Banks, FinTechs and Crypto

Trade is adapting to the accelerating change reshaping global growth.

Last year, more than $24 trillion in goods crossed borders. Roughly 80% to 90% of that trade requires some form of financing, whether from credit lines, guarantees or insurance.

For decades, the dollar-dominated, bank-led machinery of global trade finance worked in the background. Now, trade volatility, supply chain realignment, and new digital asset currencies are testing a system designed for a more integrated world.

As announcements this week from HSBC, Barclays, Visa and others reveal, trade finance is becoming a frontline battleground, one that growth-oriented chief financial officers need to pay close attention to.

Barclays announced Monday (Sept. 29) that it is creating a fully digital trade finance solution by partnering with CGI and Komgo, while HSBC Asset Management launched a novel Trade and Working Capital Solutions (TWCS) strategy Monday in partnership with its trade business, transforming trade receivables into an investible asset class.

Visa announced a pilot Tuesday (Sept. 30) to allow businesses to prefund international payments in stablecoins rather than multiple fiat accounts, representing a step toward embedding cryptocurrency rails within traditional payments infrastructure. Elsewhere, Finastra launched a new Trade Innovation Nexus integration layer Tuesday designed to streamline trade and supply chain finance workflows.

For CFOs, trade finance is moving beyond a passive necessity. It is now a strategic frontier, and one where innovation, agility and connectivity are increasingly colliding.

Read also: AI Puts Trade Finance on the Front Line of Global Growth

The Shifting Role of Trade Finance Hinges on Digitization

Traditionally, trade finance has been a conservative corner of banking. Letters of credit, export credit insurance and factoring programs evolved slowly, constrained by paper-based processes and risk-averse compliance teams. But the complexity of modern supply chains, including more counterparties, more currencies and more regulatory jurisdictions, has outgrown these tools.

“The reality is that the world is moving way faster than most companies can keep up pace with,” Wendy Tapia, head of product, receivables, at FIS, told PYMNTS in an interview posted Sept. 10. “Because of legacy systems, there are still a lot of organizations that are stuck in heavily manual processes, very fragmented systems. Without realizing it, they are limiting their agility and ability to scale.”

Global banks, still dominant in the trade finance market, are hardly standing still. The newest wave of bank innovation centers on digitizing documentation and using artificial intelligence-driven risk scoring to speed approvals.

“AI is helping us unlock the power of data that we can then use to monitor the network, to reduce fraud, to help make decisions even faster,” Judith McGuire, senior vice president of global products at Discover Network, told PYMNTS in an interview posted Friday (Oct. 3).

At the same time, FinTechs have long promised to break down the barriers to trade finance, especially for small- to medium-sized exporters and importers who have traditionally struggled to access affordable liquidity from global banks.

These FinTech platforms bring speed, lower overhead and modular integration into ERP or eCommerce systems. They also tend to be more willing to underwrite smaller ticket sizes than legacy banks constrained by regulatory capital and risk limits.

While FinTechs originally positioned themselves as bank alternatives, more recently, the dynamic has shifted to partnerships. Many FinTechs now provide technology rails that banks use to originate and manage trade finance exposures, rather than competing head-to-head for corporate clients.

The challenge for finance chiefs is to navigate a fragmented landscape. Each FinTech platform may specialize in a particular geography, commodity type or transaction structure. Selecting partners requires not just treasury expertise but also alignment with the firm’s technology stack and risk management culture.

See also: 5 Ways CFOs Are Shaking Off the Finance Function’s ‘Department of No’ Label

The Crypto and Tokenization Frontier

Perhaps the most headline-grabbing development is the emergence of crypto-enabled trade finance.

Visa’s stablecoin pilot signals how this might scale. By allowing businesses to prefund accounts in digital tokens, then convert to local currency upon settlement, the system reduces the need for multiple prefunded foreign accounts.

Beyond payments, some institutions are exploring tokenizing trade receivables themselves or using blockchain-based trade platforms where the entire documentation (invoices, bills of lading, insurance contracts) lives on-chain. In theory, that means real-time proof of title, automated triggers for settlement, and archival permanence. But in practice, the regulatory, legal and interoperability hurdles are formidable. Courts and regulators in many jurisdictions do not yet recognize tokenized documents or digital-first title.

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