How To Get Your Foot In The Door With Trade Finance

Today I sat down with Daniel and asked him a few questions on Trade Finance in particular his tips on preparing for a facility with us.

If I’m an applicant for Trade Finance – as the financier what do you want to hear that gets you excited about a deal and ultimately makes you want to provide finance?

Well there’s a couple of things that get me lets say excited.  The first thing is they need to have a decent profit margin. So anything over a 30% gross margin we’re definitely keen to talk. The second thing is they need to have solid customers that they’re supplying, so the Purchase Orders they get need to be from bigger blue chip types of customers and they need to be for finished goods. They are the two main things that get us excited.

What don’t you want to hear?

The main thing which we hear a lot that we don’t want to hear is that they want us to finance working progress, we’re paying for goods that are actually not completed but are raw materials in affect that are used to go  into production for other different types of products so that’s the main thing we don’t want to see.

If I’m going to seek funding, what are some of the steps I can take to prepare?

The first thing is to get your paperwork in order if your looking at applying for Purchase Order finance, the first thing which we are going to ask you is can I see a copy of the Purchase Order, if you don’t have that then we really don’t need to talk at this stage