MIAMI — Geopolitical shifts, tariffs and accelerating digitalisation are changing the problem corporate clients bring to trade finance banks. Rather than starting with an individual instrument or asking only how to finance a trade, clients increasingly want to discuss how financing, payments, liquidity and supply chains work together when operating conditions change quickly. Sofia Hammoucha, Standard Chartered's Global Head of Trade and Working Capital, described that as a resilience problem rather than a product problem. “What the clients are asking is a solution to the resilience problem,” she said. “They don't necessarily even want to have a conversation around how do I finance my trade.” Instead, she said clients want to discuss financing alongside payments, custody, collateral management, foreign exchange exposure and supply chain shifts. Resilience to those changes has become “a board level conversation”, she said. For Standard Chartered, that creates an opportunity to connect businesses that have traditionally been discussed separately, but Hammoucha's evidence also makes clear that the client priorities are practical: faster execution, digital capabilities that can scale and liquidity that can be released from working capital. Integrated transaction services support the broader conversation Asked what the change means for her trade and working capital remit, Hammoucha pointed to Standard Chartered's international network and the organisation of its transaction services business. She said liquidity management, payments, credit finance and custody sit within the same team, allowing the bank to approach clients “with one voice”. She described that structure as a competitive advantage for Standard Chartered. The same approach extends to digital assets. Hammoucha said the bank can discuss payments, custody, liquidity and tokenised deposits within one client conversation rather than treat each as a separate topic. Her point was organisational rather than a claim that every client problem has already been integrated. The structure gives Standard Chartered a way to bring the relevant capabilities to the same discussion as clients broaden what they expect from their transaction bank. Speed, digital capability and liquidity dominate client priorities Hammoucha identified three subjects that recur in those conversations. “The first one is they want everything faster,” she said. “Speed of solutioning and execution and conversation is paramount to their needs.” Clients also want digital solutions that can help them make decisions faster, connect with the bank more quickly and accelerate settlement. The third priority is liquidity. “When you are faced with structural uncertainty and disruption, you need to ensure you have liquidity,” Hammoucha said. Her emphasis was particularly on liquidity already embedded in receivables, payables and inventory. She said clients are asking how to optimise the working-capital cycle so they can extract more of that “natural organic liquidity”. That makes resilience less about holding a larger buffer in isolation and more about how quickly companies can see, release and move liquidity through their operating cycle. Supply-chain resilience moves deeper into existing relationships Hammoucha said supply-chain shifts are not new. Companies have been relocating activity for about 15 years, often in pursuit of cost efficiency, with ASEAN, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe among the regions that benefited. What she sees changing is the emphasis of the conversation. Clients are spending less time asking only where to move geographically and more time asking how to strengthen the supplier relationships and supply chains they already have. That extends beyond immediate suppliers. Hammoucha said clients want to know whether suppliers further down the chain have access to sufficient liquidity and technology to withstand disruption. “How do I make sure that the suppliers of my suppliers, the deep tier of that, is having access to enough liquidity?” she said. The shift connects trade finance more directly with resilience because the continuity of a large corporate's supply chain can depend on financing and operating capacity several tiers away from the buyer itself. Digital investment now faces the scale question Hammoucha said clients have already invested in artificial intelligence, platforms and tokenisation. The conversation at Sibos, in her view, was moving from whether those technologies work to whether they can operate at meaningful scale. “Proving the concept, the technology is there. The topic is around scale, so it becomes a real solution and not a proof of concept,” she said. Standard Chartered was demonstrating digital capabilities during the event, including the use of AI in processes through which clients communicate with the bank. Hammoucha also pointed to discussions around tokenised deposits, stablecoin adoption and other payment rails. Her comments did not establish that these capabilities have reached uniform scale. They identified scale as the next client question after a period of experimentation and investment. Resilience broadens the mandate without removing the underlying disciplines The resilience conversation Hammoucha described brings several established transaction-banking disciplines into the same client problem. Financing still matters, but so do the speed of execution, access to liquidity, payment and custody capabilities, and the strength of suppliers deeper in the chain. Standard Chartered's organisational response is to bring those capabilities together through transaction services and its international network. The evidence Hammoucha gave does not require a broader claim that integration itself solves resilience. It shows why clients increasingly want the bank to connect capabilities that were previously discussed as separate products. The next phase is therefore less about adding another product to the trade-finance conversation than making existing capabilities work together quickly enough, and at sufficient digital scale, to address the operating problems clients are now bringing to the bank.
