Senior Trade Finance Specialist

We're Hiring: Senior Trade Finance Specialist

Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience Level: Senior

Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a globally focused organization committed to supporting secure, efficient, and compliant international trade and cross-border financial operations across diverse markets.

Our Finance and Trade teams collaborate across Treasury, Banking, Procurement, Sales, Commercial, Logistics, Legal, Compliance, Risk, Accounting, and external financial institutions to manage trade-finance transactions, documentary requirements, working-capital solutions, and international payment obligations.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Trade Finance Specialist to lead trade-finance operations, documentary credits, guarantees, collections, import and export financing, trade documentation, bank coordination, transaction controls, and working-capital support.

The ideal candidate will combine strong technical knowledge of trade finance with excellent attention to documentation, risk awareness, banking relationships, and cross-functional coordination to ensure international trade transactions are processed accurately, efficiently, and in compliance with applicable requirements.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead day-to-day trade-finance activities across import, export, domestic, and cross-border transactions.
• Manage documentary letters of credit, standby letters of credit, documentary collections, bank guarantees, and related trade instruments.
• Review trade-finance requirements and determine appropriate transaction structures in coordination with Treasury and Commercial teams.
• Coordinate issuance, amendment, advising, confirmation, presentation, negotiation, settlement, and closure of trade-finance instruments.
• Review letters of credit for commercial, operational, documentary, and financial requirements.
• Analyze letter-of-credit terms and identify discrepancies, risks, unusual clauses, and operational constraints.
• Coordinate with banks to issue, amend, advise, confirm, and settle documentary credits.
• Ensure trade documents comply with applicable letter-of-credit terms and documentary requirements.
• Review commercial invoices, packing lists, bills of lading, certificates of origin, insurance documents, inspection certificates, and other trade documentation.
• Coordinate documentary presentations with banks and ensure timely submission of required documents.
• Review documents for completeness, consistency, and compliance before bank presentation.
• Identify and resolve documentary discrepancies, exceptions, and bank queries.
• Manage documentary collections, including clean and documentary collections, in accordance with approved procedures.
• Coordinate import and export financing arrangements with banking partners.
• Monitor trade-finance facilities, utilization, maturity dates, available limits, collateral requirements, and outstanding exposures.
• Maintain accurate records of trade-finance facilities, transactions, instruments, documents, and bank correspondence.
• Coordinate issuance and management of bank guarantees, performance guarantees, advance-payment guarantees, bid bonds, retention guarantees, and other relevant instruments.
• Monitor guarantee expiry dates, claims periods, extensions, reductions, releases, and cancellations.
• Ensure guarantees are issued within approved authorities, limits, and contractual requirements.
• Coordinate with Legal and Commercial teams on guarantee wording and contractual requirements.
• Review trade-finance terms for alignment with customer, supplier, and contractual obligations.
• Work with Procurement and Supply Chain teams on supplier-financing, import-financing, and trade-payment arrangements.
• Coordinate with Logistics and Operations teams to ensure trade documentation supports shipment and customs requirements.
• Monitor shipment milestones and documentary deadlines relevant to trade-finance transactions.
• Ensure trade-finance activities align with applicable Incoterms and contractual trade requirements.
• Coordinate with banks, suppliers, customers, freight forwarders, customs brokers, insurers, and other trade partners.
• Maintain strong working relationships with relationship managers and trade-finance teams at banking institutions.
• Negotiate trade-finance terms, transaction fees, processing arrangements, and facility requirements where appropriate.
• Monitor bank charges, commissions, interest, discounting costs, and other trade-finance expenses.
• Reconcile trade-finance transactions, bank charges, financing balances, and related accounting entries.
• Coordinate with Accounting to ensure accurate recording of trade-finance transactions.
• Support Treasury with liquidity planning, trade-finance utilization, and working-capital management.
• Monitor trade-finance maturities, repayment obligations, settlement dates, and funding requirements.
• Prepare cash-flow forecasts incorporating trade-finance commitments and expected settlements.
• Assess opportunities to optimize trade-finance facilities and reduce financing costs.
• Support working-capital optimization through appropriate use of trade-finance instruments.
• Monitor trade-finance exposure by bank, counterparty, currency, transaction type, country, and customer or supplier.
• Identify potential operational, financial, counterparty, documentation, sanctions, and compliance risks.
• Coordinate with Compliance and Financial Crime teams on KYC, AML, sanctions, and trade-compliance requirements.
• Ensure trade-finance transactions comply with applicable sanctions, export controls, anti-money-laundering, and internal compliance requirements.
• Escalate suspicious, unusual, incomplete, or high-risk transactions through appropriate channels.
• Support trade-finance audits, compliance reviews, bank audits, and internal-control assessments.
• Maintain complete and audit-ready documentation for all trade-finance transactions.
• Establish appropriate controls over trade-finance approvals, documentation, bank instructions, transaction processing, and settlements.
• Monitor segregation of duties and authorization requirements within trade-finance processes.
• Prepare trade-finance reports covering outstanding instruments, utilization, maturities, exposures, fees, discrepancies, and exceptions.
• Develop dashboards and management information for trade-finance performance and risk monitoring.
• Analyze trade-finance costs, transaction volumes, bank performance, processing times, and operational trends.
• Investigate trade-finance processing delays, errors, documentary discrepancies, and settlement issues.
• Lead corrective actions and process improvements to reduce transaction errors and processing delays.
• Support automation of trade-finance workflows, document management, transaction tracking, and reporting.
• Participate in trade-finance system implementations, upgrades, bank-platform integrations, and process-transformation projects.
• Perform user acceptance testing for trade-finance workflows, system configurations, interfaces, and reporting.
• Maintain trade-finance procedures, process documentation, checklists, and operating guidelines.
• Provide training and technical guidance to Finance, Treasury, Procurement, Commercial, and Operations teams.
• Mentor junior trade-finance professionals and review complex transactions where required.

Key Performance Indicators

• Trade-finance transaction accuracy
• Trade-finance processing turnaround time
• Letter-of-credit issuance timeliness
• Letter-of-credit amendment turnaround time
• Documentary presentation accuracy
• Documentary discrepancy rate
• Documentary discrepancy resolution time
• Bank guarantee issuance timeliness
• Bank guarantee accuracy
• Guarantee expiry monitoring accuracy
• Trade-finance facility utilization
• Facility limit compliance
• Trade-finance maturity compliance
• Trade-finance settlement accuracy
• Import-financing processing time
• Export-financing processing time
• Documentary collection processing accuracy
• Trade-finance transaction error rate
• Trade-finance exception rate
• Bank query resolution time
• Trade-finance cost per transaction
• Bank fee and commission control
• Financing-cost optimization
• Interest-cost management
• Trade-finance cash-flow forecast accuracy
• Working-capital improvement
• Trade-finance exposure accuracy
• Counterparty exposure monitoring
• Trade-finance documentation completeness
• Trade-document compliance rate
• Sanctions and compliance screening completion
• KYC and AML compliance
• Trade-finance control effectiveness
• Audit finding rate
• Audit issue remediation
• Bank service-level compliance
• Bank relationship performance
• Trade-finance reporting accuracy
• Reporting timeliness
• Trade-finance system data accuracy
• Automation adoption
• Manual processing reduction
• Process improvement completion
• Trade-finance training completion
• Stakeholder satisfaction
• Operational-risk reduction
• Trade-finance policy compliance

Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate should have strong experience in trade finance, treasury, international banking, corporate finance, import/export finance, or banking operations, preferably within a multinational, trading, manufacturing, logistics, commodities, financial-services, or internationally active organization.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Strong knowledge of trade-finance products and international banking processes.
• Proven experience managing letters of credit, documentary collections, and bank guarantees.
• Strong understanding of import and export financing.
• Experience reviewing and processing trade documentation.
• Strong knowledge of documentary requirements and discrepancy management.
• Understanding of international trade practices and Incoterms.
• Experience coordinating with banks, customers, suppliers, logistics providers, and internal stakeholders.
• Strong understanding of trade-finance facilities, limits, maturities, collateral, and transaction exposure.