Using Trade Finance to offer credit to your export customers

Welcome to Export Success, a weekly 30 minute online radio blog with one goal: To help you grow your business by succeeding in the global marketplace. I’m the host of Export Success, Dr. Robert Letovsky

How many times have you found yourself in a situation where the difference between making a sale and losing the business came down to offering some kind of credit to your potential buyer?  Did you give the buyer the credit terms they wanted?  Or did you find yourself walking away from the sale because you couldn’t afford the risk that you might not be paid in timely way, or even paid at all?  These kinds of concerns can be multiplied many times over when your buyer is in a foreign market.  You may not know much about the buyer or the buyer’s country, you certainly don’t know what your legal rights are in the country, and the distance factor may make you unwilling to ship the goods without being paid first.  Meanwhile, your foreign buyer – just like buyers here in the U.S. – may be asking or even insisting on some type of credit arrangement to even consider buying your products.  What to do?  That’s where trade finance tools come into play.

This week on Export Success, I’ll be speaking to Joseph W. Mooney, Vice President Global Trade Finance for TD Bank based in Boston MA.  Joe will explain how exporters can move beyond insisting that foreign customers pay up front as a condition of doing business.  Drawing on his 35 years of experience in the field, Joe will outline a range of options that exporters can draw on to build their export sales while reducing the risk of non-payment by foreign buyers.