INTRODUCING CHRIS HALL (LLOYDS BANK); ONE OF THE THREE NEW ITFA BOARD MEMBERS

Chris Hall is Head of Trade Asset Management (TAM) for Lloyds Bank’s Global Transaction Banking, responsible for the development of the secondary market trade finance offering. Chris is based in London and has been in this role since early 2015 when he joined Lloyds to set up and establish TAM. Before this, he spent 9 years at the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Chris has 10 years of transaction banking experience, through sales of trade finance and international cash management solutions to corporates in London and the South East, followed by working in Trade Distribution, dealing mainly with Financial Institutions. He has also worked on the project delivery and strategy side of Transaction Banking, having been Business Manager to a senior Change Management executive.

Chris holds a LLB in Law from the University of Bristol and has attained Associate Membership of the Corporation of Treasurers (AMCT).

''Having been elected onto the ITFA Board at the recent conference, I am delighted to have been asked to build on the great work already done on the Young Professionals side of our business.

As Sean alluded to in his introduction to October’s newsletter, I think that the whole industry, let alone this organisation, is at a crossroads. I am keen to harness the wealth of experience we have in the trade finance and forfaiting world and use this to develop the next generation of colleagues and by extension the future growth of our markets. For me, this requires us to look across the whole spectrum from the back office through to the front office and to this end, I would ask all members of the Association to nominate those who you think would benefit from this development.

I will be working closely with both Paul Coles and Zeyno de Vries-Davutoglu on the Market Practice and Education briefs as they are inextricably linked. We would like to run some round-table sessions and panel discussions, quite possibly on a virtual basis to allow greater participation and would like to tie in with some of the mentoring work that Duarte Pedreira has been running. For new entrants to the industry, much of our world, whether it be our products or MRPAs can be a mystery that we would like to help clarify! I would ask all members of the Association to nominate those who you think would benefit from this tailored development and mentoring and similarly, should any of you like to be mentors, then please reach out to Duarte or myself.

Many of you will have attended the “Alternative” or the ITFA Conference and I am delighted to see so many colleagues joining for the first time. We will work to create more, similar, opportunities for networking and development and will co-ordinate with the regional committees and where possible make sure that our Young Professionals can build strong cross-border networks which will allow them to function effectively in the business.

You will also have seen that ITFA will be starting to use Twitter, Linkedin and other forms of social media more often, giving greater exposure to both the Association’s and YP’s latest news. If you haven’t already, please connect with, or follow, ITFA and watch out for our updates and retweets!

Amongst others, Johanna Wissing, Philipp Moulas and Duarte Pedreira have been heavily involved with these initiatives so far - my thanks to them all - if there are any other volunteers who would like to work with us on developing this further, please let me know by sending an email on chris.hall@itfa.org.''