TF COP 2026 Summit opens in Split, local currency solutions key to eliminating SME financing gap

Closing the trade finance gap through institutional partnership

The bodies that set the standards, write the rules and build the capacity have to do it together.

At TF COP 2026, a coalition of market practitioners collectively aimed at eliminating the trade finance gap, TTP Editor in Chief Deepesh Patel moderated the Industry Associations Update, with BAFT, the Berne Union, FCI, ICISA and ITFA. 

These are the five associations and industry bodies that founded TF COP, aimed at making SME trade assets more visible, financeable, hedgeable, insurable and investable, through transaction banking advocacy, export credit and investment insurance, factoring and receivables rails across emerging markets, trade credit insurance and surety, as well as the digital and legal reform agenda.

After two years of dialogue since TF COP was established in 2024, association leaders discussed market updates around capital relief, invoice registries, local currency solutions and capacity building that help SMEs.

Follow TTP for coverage across the week from Split.

Pictured: Tod Burwell, Aysen Cetintas, Daniel de Búrca, Sean Edwards, Yuichiro Akita, Deepesh Patel

Addressing local currency SME lending head on. 

On a local currency lending panel at TF COP 2026, moderated by Duarte Pedreira with George Wilson, Ahanna Anaba, Gursu Keles (EBRD), Sean Edwards (ITFA) and Betül Kurtulus (FCI), local currency SME lending was discussed in detail. 

The African Development Bank’s latest Trade Finance Report puts unmet demand at $74bn to $92bn in 2024, and warns it could widen to as much as $102.6bn by 2027. 

Yet the reality on the ground is overwhelmingly local currency. Panelists argued that as much as 70 to 90 per cent of real trade finance and working capital in Africa is in local currency, trapped in billions of invoices across all 54 countries, in naira, shillings and cedi, for up to 90 days. 

The constraint is not hard currency, but capital relief in local currency and a mechanism to distribute it, which is precisely the problem the FI Trade 3.0 Schema was designed to solve.

TTP heard from George Wilson in January, discussing the FI Trade 3.0 Schema Trade. Read more here: https://tradetreasurypayments.com/articles/unlocking-africas-sme-trade-potential-the-fi-trade-3-0-schema

Pictured: Duarte Pedreira, George Wilson, Ahanna Anaba, Gursu Keles, Sean Edwards, Betül Kurtulus

The Trade Finance Conference of Parties (TF COP) is gathered today in Split, Croatia—a coalition of financial institutions, multilaterals, trade associations and technology companies—collectively addressing market gaps in SME finance.

Established in 2024 under ‘The Washington Declaration’, TF COP recognises the SME trade finance gap as a local-currency problem, because SMEs typically earn, spend and repay in local currency.

Panelists have described the bottleneck; local lenders lack the capital relief and FX hedging tools to move surplus capital safely into local-currency assets.

TF COP’s conclusion is that both gaps (non-G10 FX hedging and SME capital relief) must be solved in parallel, and in the meantime MDBs and DFIs are the immediate channel to fund, hedge, guarantee and provide local-currency capital-relief solutions that let local lenders extend more to SMEs.

Last week, Wilton Park launched its report “Local Currency Finance: what works, what scales, what’s next?” — the product of a July 2026 FCDO-convened dialogue, concluding that development finance must provide affordable local-currency finance while building the onshore FX infrastructure needed to hedge and manage currency risk.

Crucially, the report validated the TF COP thesis—the SME financing gap cannot be solved as a hard-currency problem—embedding the coalition’s market-architecture framing (capital, risk, distribution and FX infrastructure) into conclusions that now call for local-currency finance to become core to MDB reform, private capital mobilisation and the G20 agenda.

Trade Treasury Payments are delighted to be media partners of TF COP, and will be reporting throughout this summit, supported by EBRD Trade Facilitation Programme and FCI.