TTP and seven MDBs publish two-year progress report on supply chain finance

When the WTO and IFC brought together leaders of multilateral development banks in Bangkok on 16 October, on the sidelines of the IMF and World Bank Group Annual Meetings, they reviewed two years of progress under the 2024 Joint Statement on supply chain finance and reaffirmed their commitment to the Supply Chain Finance Task Force. The WTO says direct financing by multilateral development banks has grown to about US$65bn in 2026, of which US$10bn is supply chain finance in developing economies, two to three times the 2024 level, while the World Bank Group used the same week to launch a new MSME strategy. Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) has now launched Two Years of Progress in Supply Chain Finance, an independent publication produced with input from ADB, AfDB, Afreximbank, EBRD, IDB Invest, IFC and ITFC, with edits from the WTO, and commissioned by the IFC, setting out what each institution has done since the Joint Statement, with one case study from each.

In October 2024, on the margins of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington, the World Trade Organization and six multilateral development banks (MDBs) put their names to a Joint Statement on boosting supply chain trade in emerging markets.1 It committed every signatory to coordinated action in five areas: increasing financial support, strengthening legal infrastructure, promoting common marketplaces, building market awareness and capacity, and widening the range of products available.

The problem it addressed was not new. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) supply much of what the world trades, and in emerging markets they are the firms least able to finance the wait between shipping an order and being paid for it. The shortfall in finance for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in developing economies runs into trillions of dollars, with a significant share of it sitting inside supply chains as unpaid receivables and unsold inventory. In the Asian Development Bank’s latest survey, four in ten trade finance requests from small firms were refused.

Supply chain finance (SCF) answers that problem more directly than most of the instruments available. It allows a small supplier to be paid early at a price set by the credit standing of its large buyer rather than its own. The umbrella term covers a range of techniques, set out in the introduction. It is short term, it is self-liquidating, and it reaches firms that own nothing a bank would traditionally accept as security. Yet it remains concentrated in a small number of markets, because it depends on things many countries do not have: laws that allow a receivable to be sold and settle who owns it when two lenders claim the same one, registries that make those claims visible, invoices a computer can read, and banks that know how to price the product.

That is why the Joint Statement was framed as a division of labour. Some of the work is investment. A great deal of it is legislation, registries, training and platforms, none of which appears in a disbursement figure.

Deepesh Patel, Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief of TTP, writes in the publication’s foreword:

Two years on, this publication sets out what has been done. Trade Treasury Payments approached implementing institutions independently and put the same questions to them. What follows is our account, and the comparison it invites is not one of size. Each institution works in different markets, under different mandates, with different instruments. The value of reading them together lies in seeing how much of the agenda is shared.

We are conscious of how much remains. The volume of supply chain finance has grown faster than the share of it reaching the smallest firms, and closing that distance is the work of the next phase. But the direction is set, the instruments are proven and the reforms are being written into law in places that had none five years ago. A lack of trade and supply chain finance should not be the reason a small firm cannot sell abroad.

The pages that follow are a record of the work being done so that it is not.

Passing the law is the quick part

In October 2024 the World Trade Organization and six multilateral development banks (MDBs) promised to work together on supply chain finance (SCF) across five areas. Two years later, there are new laws, new platforms and new products. The pages that follow look at what changed, and at the work that starts before and continues after a law is passed.

Trade Treasury Payments put the same five questions to every signatory and asked each to choose one piece of its own work to describe. TTP conducted the interviews and wrote the pages, then sent each institution its section to check for accuracy. The institutions did not approve the publication as a whole, and nothing here represents a joint position.

The first page of each section sets out the institution’s progress against the five areas, using its own figures. The second looks closely at the case it chose. The cases are deliberately different: a law drafted by an MDB’s lawyer in one section, a capacity-building grant in another, and Shariah certification in a third.

The seven case studies are:

• Asian Development Bank (ADB) – Mongolia: a supply chain finance programme designed around the collection centre
• African Development Bank (AfDB) – Africa: factoring training for banks, factoring companies and regulators
• African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) – Egypt: a test of the case for factoring laws
• European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) – Ukraine: a factoring law that began as a joint EBRD–National Bank of Ukraine draft
• IDB Invest – Mexico: a laboratory for reverse factoring
• International Finance Corporation (IFC) – Nigeria: building a supply chain finance market
• International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation (ITFC) – Islamic finance behind open account trade

Legal foundation is key

FCI’s legal study, published in October 2023, extended an existing European survey to markets outside the EU.2 In the 58 non-EU countries it covers, 37 reported a dedicated factoring law and 21 did not. Of those 21, ten reported no legislation at all on transferring a receivable. Ukraine, Georgia and Nigeria were in that last group. Ukraine and Georgia have legislated since, and Nigeria’s bill has passed both chambers.

Ukraine adopted its factoring law in June 2025 and it came into force in July 2026. The register the law depends on has yet to be set up. Nigeria’s bill had passed both chambers of the National Assembly by June 2026 but was still awaiting presidential assent.

Egypt shows what comes next. It passed its law in 2018. Its regulator has issued rules almost every year since, covering everything from Shariah-compliant factoring and digital contracts to an electronic check designed to stop the same invoice being financed twice.

The international template moved too. UNIDROIT’s Model Law on Factoring, adopted in 2023, now has a Guide to Enactment telling a legislature how to put the text into domestic law.3,4 UNIDROIT’s Governing Council approved that guide. EBRD says its own reform work aligns the countries it advises with the model law.

The full publication, including each institution’s progress against the five areas and all seven case studies, can be read here: Two Years of Progress in Supply Chain Finance.

Notes

1. Joint Statement on Supply Chain Finance, World Trade Organization and the African Development Bank, African Export-Import Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, IDB Invest and the International Finance Corporation, Washington DC, 27 October 2024.

2. FCI, legal study of factoring and receivables finance frameworks, October 2023. The 58 countries cited here are the non-EU portion of a study covering 91 jurisdictions in total.

3. UNIDROIT Model Law on Factoring, adopted 2023.

4. UNIDROIT Guide to Enactment of the Model Law on Factoring, approved by the Governing Council at its 107th session, published version dated May 2026.