Adviser — Commodity Trade Finance Underwriting

What the credit assessment should cover

Examine the counterparties, goods, logistics, documents, payment terms and funding sequence together. Identify conditions that must be satisfied before disbursement and evidence required during the transaction. Review whether collateral or guarantees genuinely reduce the relevant risk, with legal assumptions referred to qualified specialists.

Adviser responsibilities

Develop an underwriting approach that separates normal completion from downside recovery. Recommend stress cases for delay, price movement, quality dispute and buyer failure. Improve credit papers so decision-makers can see the main uncertainties, exceptions and monitoring obligations without reconstructing the transaction themselves.

Credit papers should explain the sequence of control over goods and proceeds, identifying periods when funding is outstanding but protection is incomplete. Conditions before disbursement should be observable and assigned to a verifier, not described as broad assurances. The adviser should test the transaction under a delayed shipment, quality dispute or changed buyer and identify whether the existing approval remains valid. Underwriting guidance must also recognise when operational monitoring is too complex for the lender’s resources, even if the transaction is theoretically financeable.

Candidate requirements

Candidates should have direct commodity trade-finance underwriting experience and exposure to transactions that did not perform as expected. They need practical knowledge of documentation, settlement and collateral controls, together with the judgement to decline a structure that cannot be adequately monitored.

Evidence of a useful engagement

The work should produce decision-ready underwriting guidance and worked cases that demonstrate how conclusions change when assumptions fail. Candidates should explain an apparently well-secured transaction they rejected or restructured. Credit approval remains with the authorised decision-makers; the adviser’s role is to improve the quality and consistency of the evidence supporting those decisions.