The chair of the International Chamber of Commerce’s (ICC’s) Banking Commission, Daniel Schmand, has called on authorities to create a global body to work jointly with the industry and regulators to deal with the compliance issue.

Speaking at a European Bank of Reconstruction and Development Bank conference in Frankfurt, he suggested organisations should harmonise their efforts to remove confusion caused by so many different sets of regulations worldwide.

Standardisation call

Schmand wants organisations such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, and the International Monetary Fund to work to set up a standard set of transaction monitoring principles for trade finance.

He maintains there are currently too many regulators, making it unclear to banks whether they should be following domestic regulation, the recipient bank’s foreign regulation, or international regulation.

No deal

As a result, they avoid the transaction altogether, and the collateral damage of this needs to be brought to the attention of politicians and regulators, he explained.

Compliance and regulation were seen as the biggest barriers blocking access to trade finance according to over 90 per cent of banks surveyed for the ICC’s latest annual review (DC World News, 17 October 2016)

The ICC Global Survey can be downloaded from here.