ICC Trade Register

ICC Trade Finance Report 2013 - Download

Financial regulation requires a solid understanding of the critical issues by all sides – government, regulatory, industry, and multilateral institutions. The ICC Trade Register helps enhance this understanding by making available much-needed data on trade and export finance for the first time.

When world trade collapsed during the global economic meltdown that began in 2008, trade and export finance suffered a consequent decline. The traditional role of trade and export finance as a low-risk asset class even came into question amid the turmoil in global financial markets. When regulators and bankers tried to assess the trade and export finance picture and its role during the crisis, timely, accurate and comprehensive data were lacking.

It was in 2009 that the ICC Banking Commission established the ICC Trade Register to advance understanding of various products and their risk characteristics in trade and export finance. This initiative assisted the industry in developing a pool of data to evaluate the long-held claim that trade and export finance is a relatively low-risk form of financing. It also provides a much-needed empirical basis for discussions regarding the treatment of trade financing under the Basel framework.

During its initial period, the Register contained data from 5.22 million trade transactions conducted around the world by nine leading international banks. The Register’s early information showed that most of the US$2.5 trillion worth of trade deals were short-term in nature, averaging 115 days. The banks participating in the project reported only 1,140 defaults in these transactions.

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Pilot phase

The pilot phase, named the ICC-ADB Trade Finance Default Register, was initiated and funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). The pilot was completed in September 2010 and its findings were presented to the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which was considering how to treat trade finance under its Basel III regulations on banks’ capital adequacy requirements.

At the October 2010 meeting of the WTO Expert Group on Trade and Finance, ICC was requested to establish the Register on a permanent basis as the primary market intelligence tool providing much needed data to facilitate the assessment of the treatment of trade finance products under the Basel framework.

ICC Trade Register Brochure - Download

Continued commitment

The ICC Trade Register Working Group expressed its continued commitment to comply with such a request. Many members of the ICC Banking Commission have also expressed a desire to join and/or benefit from this project, and ICC is keen to make sure that we can provide such a service in the future.

Going forward, the ICC Trade Register benefited from continuous improvement. The use of additional data from an increasing number of participating banks (21 in 2012) has been essential in providing significant additional value to the ICC Trade Register. In addition, for the first time, medium and long-term export finance data were collected and analyzed, which improved overall data availability and composition.

The Banking Commission will continue to work to broaden and deepen the data in the Register to ensure that it is a comprehensive long-term tool that can be used by regulators and banks alike to assess the status of the trade finance market.

Contact Us

If you are interested in becoming an official partner and to start using the ICC Trade Register, please contact:.

David BISCHOF

ICC Banking Commission

david.bischof@iccwbo.org

Global Risks – Trade Finance Report

Based on data from ICC’s Trade Register, the ICC Banking Commission issues the “Global Risks – Trade Finance” report on a yearly basis providing a timely, accurate and comprehensive outlook on the risks in trade finance from the global trade finance industry’s perspective.