Issue 03 - Foreword - Trade Treasury Payments

Wilkommen nach Frankfurt! We are so excited to launch this latest edition of TTP from Sibos. This is the first Sibos for the TTP team, but were not strangers to the show. We’re so excited to be back, in fact, the entire editorial team is here in Frankfurt. Since launching TTP 168 days ago, we’ve produced 532 pieces of content from 46 different countries, racking up 22k reads and 3.4 million impressions across our 7k social followers. 

Our mission is simply to help every market participant—from global banks to first-time exporters—navigate the increasingly interdependent financial environment. If Investopedia helped millions understand investing, we aspire to do the same for the world of liquidity and risk management.

We believe liquidity helps livelihoods prosper. When capital flows confidently and risk is managed transparently, businesses and people thrive. TTP exists to support that flow—through education, open access resources, and global conversation. And as we begin this journey, we want to be clear: we aim to leave no institution, no market, and no region behind.

Welcome to ‘System Failure’. Our call for help. 

Systems fail in small ways before they fail in big ones. In trade, treasury, and payments, those small failures show up as shipping delays that should not happen, exposure risks that are mispriced, and payment flows that stall on mismatched standards. 

As we were putting this special issue of the magazine together, we decided on the theme of System Error. Not to suggest imminent breakdown. Far from it, in fact. We wanted this edition to highlight the many areas across these interconnected industries where today’s architecture is out of step with the 24/7/365 world it is meant to serve. That is why this edition brings together stories from across law, regulation, and markets. You will find examples of reform where ambition runs ahead of infrastructure, accounts of finance reshaped by risk and regulation, and glimpses of treasury adapting to shifting currencies and credit models. Each piece, in its own way, traces the outline of a system adjusting under pressure.

It is fitting that we are releasing this edition at Sibos, held this year in Frankfurt, as it is a gathering built on the promise of making global finance work more smoothly. Yes, many of the articles that follow point to problems in the current system. But far from being harbingers of doom, many of them also point to alignment, recalibration, and innovation.

Within the technology and digitalisation section, we flag the cost of waiting and argue that each year that the digital transition is delayed, inefficiencies compound and opportunities slip further out of reach. But we also report on the promising news of France and Mauritius adopting the UNCITRAL Model Law, showing how legal systems are catching up with the needs of digital trade.

In the trade and distribution section, our articles on private lenders driving the debt crisis, rising demand for credit and political risk insurance, and new factoring geographies across Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia show how capital is being redistributed, sometimes constructively, sometimes unevenly.

In the treasury and payments section we look at the “buy now, pay later” boom and how credit models can expand faster than the controls around them. Other features trace how treasurers are adapting to volatility through currency choices, new digital assets, and evolving hedging strategies, while reports on fraud, bad debts, and the weakening dollar reveal where payment flows remain exposed.

None of the tensions rendered throughout these pages are signs of collapse. Nor do they undermine the system as a whole. Our industries have built the fail-safes needed to keep the system running when these errors occur. What these tensions do is remind us that progress rarely arrives in a straight line. The errors that we’re seeing are feedback. A warning message that it is time to adapt. To apply a modernised patch and reboot the system.

To read the pages that follow together is to see how the many systems that create these industries – to which many of you have devoted entire careers – continue to iterate and adapt to the needs of our changing world. You could say they are perfectly imperfect in their own right.

This System Error is less of a warning than it is an invitation. We call on you to notice where the bugs appear in the systems you operate in. Where those systems are overloaded. Where the bottlenecks are. Where they are bound to timeout. Notice these system errors and learn from them. Imagine how they can be patched. Tinker with how they can be optimised. And when it’s needed, decide when the best time is to reboot the system entirely. 

In doing so, the industry has the chance to build something more far resilient than what came before.

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