Trade finance

Most export deals fail on cash timing rather than demand. You ship, and you wait sixty days to be paid. Trade finance in the sidebar describes that problem in plain words and matches you to institutions that work your corridor.

The question it asks

You do not have to know the name of the instrument. The first question is What are you financing? and the options are situations, not products:

I shipped and I’m waiting to be paid.
My buyer needs a guarantee or bond.

Answer it and the instrument fills itself in — invoice discounting, factoring, and so on — under a line that says We selected this from your answer. You can change it. If you do know what you want, change it.

A financing request: the situation question, the instrument chosen from it, amount and tenor, the Zimbabwe to South Africa route, and the buyer with a repeat or new status — The request, in the order you would say it out loud

Then three short blocks:

How much, and for how long — amount, currency, tenor in days.
Route — origin and destination, which draws the corridor back to you.
Who is paying — the buyer’s name and country, and whether they are a repeat buyer or a new one.

Mashonaland Highlands raised three requests. One of them: invoice discounting, Zimbabwe to South Africa, $91,200, 60 days, buyer Durban Kernel Co, repeat — which is the real invoice logged on the macadamia project. Press Find financiers. It is free.

What happens after Find financiers

The request is matched against institutions that serve that corridor and that instrument, and it lands on its own page with a status. Matching sixteen financiers for the South Africa request took seconds.

The South Africa financing request after its documents were saved: a case open with an institution and awaiting its decision, file completeness at 85 percent with the 60 percent threshold named, supporting documents each carrying its own weight, and Meridian scoped to this request — Completeness, with the threshold and its meaning both stated

The important number on that page is File completeness, and the sentence under it is the clearest in the console: We pass requests to financiers at 60%. This measures how much of the file is filled in, not whether it will be approved. Once the file passes 60 percent, as the South Africa one above has, the second half changes to Your file is complete enough to send. What a financier decides is theirs.

Under it, Supporting documents, each carrying the weight it adds: a signed purchase order or contract and a commercial invoice are worth more than collateral you may not have. Tick what you hold, name the buyer and the buyer country, and press Save documents. Mashonaland Highlands took its South Africa file from 15 percent to 85 percent that way.

Then choose an institution from the matches to open a case. The South Africa request opened a case with a named trade-finance institution and moved to Awaiting decision, with the institution’s response due in four days on the page. Each stage carries its own service-level line, so you know what you are waiting for.

What is shared, and what is not

Nothing reaches an institution until you open a case with it. The request page says so while it is still yours.
Promote:Global does not lend, decide or guarantee. The Meridian panel on this page says it in full: Meridian does not make credit, know-your-customer, anti-money-laundering, sanctions or guarantee decisions. Neither does the platform. It routes a file to institutions that might.
Promote:Global takes no cut of what you close. We charge subscriptions and nothing else.

Using Meridian here

The dock on a financing request is scoped to that request and answers correctly about it — it will list your open requests with the right amounts and the right total. Useful questions: which instrument suits a repeat buyer on open account, what a discounting house will want to see on a first file, and what the documents in the list actually have to contain.

A note on the match list

Several institutions can come back on the same score with no tiebreak between them. Treat the list as a shortlist to research rather than a ranking to obey, and read each one’s own page before you open a case.

In the console

Each of these pages carries an (i) beside its title. This is what it says, and where it sends you next.

Trade finance: Describe a financing need and find relevant financiers.
Check the corridor
Financing request: One financing request: its file, its matches, and the case you opened.
Back to Trade finance
Track the reply

What to do next

Raise a request, then spend ten minutes on the supporting documents. Below 60 percent it does not go anywhere.
Track the reply in Messages and notifications.