At the International Trade and Forfaiting Association’s (ITFA) Annual Conference in Singapore, Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) spoke with Dr. Rebecca Harding, author of The World at Economic War and Editorial Board Member at TTP, about her work on social return on investment (SROI) and the shifts in global trade.

Harding said, “The problem with ESG is it’s become this big compliance burden for absolutely everybody. The compliance criteria are shifting slightly and the US is changing its attitudes towards ‘E’. What we need to start thinking about is how we still measure impact … we need to think about people and purpose.”

Her focus at ITFA was on developing frameworks that assess the broader societal, social, and security impacts of trade finance – other possible meanings of the ‘S’ is ESG. SROI, she explained, provides a way to quantify benefits such as job creation, economic spillovers, and value-chain progression in emerging markets. This gives regulators and banks a clearer sense of how trade finance transactions deliver measurable outcomes beyond traditional compliance.

Harding said, “Social return on investment is what you get back in terms of social returns. We can measure those economically against a pound invested or a dollar invested. And this is doing exactly the same thing for trade finance and trade finance transactions.”

Looking beyond ESG, Harding also addressed the wider geopolitical climate. She argued that the world is already in a state of “economic war,” with the United States and China competing to reshape the international rules-based order. For Europe, she noted, this presents particular challenges as its post-war institutions were designed for stability, not rapid adaptation.

Harding said, “The world is at economic war, and I don’t think we should be couching that up in nice terms. Nationalism has actually turned into something which is threatening the entire economic order of the last 80 years.”

With her new book, Harding is urging institutions to build preparedness into their strategies. That means measuring impact, anticipating risks, and developing organisational flexibility to respond to uncertainty.

Harding said, “There’s no normal to return to. Change is endemic, it always has been. What we can do is prepare for the worst and hope for the best. That means pushing institutions outside of their comfort zones and giving them the frameworks to navigate uncertainty.”

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