Announcing the 2015 Greenwich Leaders in U.S. Large Corporate Trade Finance

The market’s biggest banks are expanding their footprints in trade finance as large U.S. companies seek support for their expanding international businesses. 

J.P. Morgan  and Bank of America Merrill Lynch  are tied atop the U.S. large corporate trade finance market, according to a new study from Greenwich Associates.

About 41% of large U.S. companies use one or both banks for trade finance. Citi ranks third with a market penetration of 37%, followed by HSBC and Well Fargo, which are tied at 24–25%. These firms are the 2015 Greenwich Share Leaders in U.S. Large Corporate Trade Finance. 

As a group, these leading banks are claiming a growing number of trade finance relationships with large U.S. companies. The largest domestic banks alone saw their aggregate market penetration score increase by some 10 percentage points over the past 12 months.

Growing Demand For International Trade Finance
The success in winning new clients can be attributed in part to the growing demand for international trade finance among large U.S. companies. Approximately two-thirds of these companies now use cross-border trade finance services for transactions into Mexico and Canada. Fifty-two percent use international trade finance in Asia, and about half the companies use it in Western Europe. Usage rates for both Latin America and Central/Eastern Europe are 35–36%. 

“The market’s biggest banks are taking full advantage of this mounting demand for international trade services,” says Greenwich Associates consultant Andrew Grant. “They have an obvious built-in advantage as they are leveraging existing corporate banking relationships to cross-sell their trade finance services.”

Big U.S. and global providers are also getting a boost from the increasing use of electronic systems to initiate and manage trade finance.  “Because large banks have the resources to deploy the best and most sophisticated IT platforms, as trade finance becomes more electronic, business gravitates to the biggest providers and the market becomes increasingly concentrated at the top,” says Andrew Grant. 

2015 Greenwich Quality Leaders
Four banks share the title of Greenwich Quality Leader in 2015: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan, and Wells Fargo.