Core problem

Ian undertook deep market research over 3 months and 55 hours of user interviews.

The key finding is that access to international trade for developing markets companies barely exists; and for SMEs is non-existent. Some quotes from the research are below:

Banks have retrenched from offering trade finance to companies other than those that are large and listed, or government-linked. This is primarily due to cross-border banking issues and AML concerns.

Modern FX brokers in the West have improved international payments, but only solve for one small piece of cross-border trade transactions, and in any case are largely not available in developing markets.

The research surfaced three major groupings for the issues faced in international trade for companies in developing markets:

International payments

Payments through traditional banking rails are slow, expensive, and not available to all legitimate firms.

Efficient payment is only one part of an international trade transaction, hence modern payments solutions are a local maximum, not a global maximum.

Access to credit

Access to credit in developing markets is a known problem.

Access to credit for cross-border transactions is even less accessible.

Lack of access to credit for importers creates prohibitively large and adverse working capital requirements.

Trust

In 2024, trade is increasingly remote. However traditional trade finance instruments that allowed two parties to trade with trust (foreign credit, LCs, etc) are only given to the largest firms by banks.

Importers and exporters create iterative methods to create trust, which take a lot of time and are financially inefficient.