Commodity finance aims to provide short-term, self-liquidating finance facilities to a range of trading companies from the mid-sized specialist product trader to the globally-integrated major trading houses. These facilities may be secured or unsecured depending upon our perception of the creditworthiness of the borrower and the structure of the business we are undertaking. Our major business lines comprise steel and base metals, energy products and agricultural commodities. Generally we target business where there are liquid terminal markets for the underlying commodity, but we will also work selectively with market-leaders that trade less liquid commodities.

SMBC group’s trade finance team for commodities operates on a global basis providing comprehensive solutions for the finance of international trade. We employ a team of professionals, all of whom have multi-year experience in commodity finance and can offer our customers a range of traditional or bespoke commodity-finance solutions using a full range of products, including:

• Issuance of Letters of Credit
• Standby Letters of Credit
• Guarantees and similar trade finance instruments
• L/C confirmation services
• Warehouse and receivables financing

The Commodity Finance team also works in close cooperation with colleagues in pre-export, shipping finance, and Export Credit Agency backed finance to deliver a comprehensive solutions based offering to all of our customers, however large or small.