* SWIFT to help banks handle inter-company trade finance
* Providing data to bank efforts to monitor market
* Value of trade finance deals increased since early 2009
By Jonathan Lynn
GENEVA, Jan 29 (Reuters) - Banks can capture a bigger share of the multi-trillion-dollar market in trade finance which is now recovering from the economic crisis, a senior official at the interbank financial messaging group SWIFT said on Friday.
SWIFT is working with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) on a product to enable banks to handle some of the $15 trillion in world trade financed directly by corporates, said Andre Casterman, head of SWIFT's trade and supply chain team.
The move is in parallel to work by SWIFT to provide the chamber and banks with more data on the trade finance markets, as banks seek to convince regulators that trade finance is less risky than its current treatment suggests. [ID:nLDE60R253]
In terms of the number of transactions, trade finance passing through SWIFT has been increasing since early last year, but irregularly, with for instance a drop between June and September, Casterman told Reuters.
"On the other side, the value trend of letters of credit has increased since March without these ups and downs," he said.
VALUE DATA
Some $1.5 trillion a year in the simple and low-risk trade finance instruments such as letters of credit go through SWIFT, a cooperative of over 8,300 banks in 209 countries that banks use to exchange financial messages, Casterman told Reuters.
But these bank-mediated instruments have been falling in importance compared with direct "open-account" arrangements between suppliers and purchasers, which now fund some 80 percent of world trade, he said.
SWIFT's proposed bank payment obligation, for which the ICC will agree standard treatment, will allow banks to re-intermediate some of this business.
SWIFT and Deutsche Bank
The first real transactions should follow mid-year, with the ICC endorsing the rules by the end of the year.
Details of the trade finance market are hard to come by since the Bank for International Settlements, the Basel-based bank for central banks, and other international bodies stopped collating data in 2004 on cost grounds.
But the need for information became acute as the market dried up in late 2008 and early 2009 under the impact of the credit crunch and slump in demand.
SWIFT is providing data on trade finance to the ICC for its next survey, whose results will be presented to the G20 summit in Canada in June after a sneak preview at the Beijing meeting.
SWIFT will give the ICC a breakdown by instrument, such as letters of credit, and region, going beyond the global data available on its website www.swift.com .
But this information counts messages in the system, in other words the number of deals, rather than the value.
SWIFT has about 175,000 messages a day on letters of credit, although a single transaction will involve several messages as it is amended and negotiated.
Messages on trade in 2009 totalled 41.8 million, a decline of 8.6 percent, adjusted for business days, on 2008. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has forecast trade would contract by 10 percent in 2009.
But SWIFT is also attempting to measure the value of the market, taking data from four representative days over the past 12 months for the ICC to analyse.
"It was a one-off but we will do more," Casterman said.
Value data will also be offered to customers by September who track their market share through SWIFT's Watch product. (For SWIFT data go to http://link.reuters.com/cuh66h ) (Editing by Stephanie Nebehay and Andy Bruce)