| Headline: Trade finance lures institutions Source: Euromoney Date: January 2001 Author: Peter Lee The $700 billion trade-finance market is one of the few large pools of tradeable fixed-income assets that has not yet attracted the attention of institutional fixed-income investors. Changing that, and propelling the fragmented and illiquid trade-finance market through the same developments that transformed the emerging-market debt market in the 1980s is the ambition of a group of bankers and traders who last month launched Internet Trade Finance Exchange (ITF).
“The aim is to create liquidity and transparency of pricing for trade-finance assets that will enable fixed-income investors finally to deem this an asset class,” says Hernando Pérez, president of ITF and a veteran of emerging markets debt trading and structuring. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||