If you are an exporter, and you sell using secured terms like cash against documents, one risk in your transaction is that you deliver your product in good faith to your customer’s port, but your customer does not accept them. For exporters of commodity products, this risk is heightened when there has been a drop in the price of the product between the time of order and the time of delivery. You are then left in the very difficult position of finding a new buyer, or renegotiating price with the original customer who may think he has you over a barrel, all while you have already incurred shipping costs and while demurrage charges are adding up daily and the clock ticks on how much time you have before your product spoils. Not a pleasant position to be in, and historically, credit insurance has not been able to provide protection for this situation. A central condition of having a valid credit insurance claim is that you have a loss because your customer has become insolvent, and in this case the customer is not insolvent, he is just commercially refusing to accept the goods. Recently, however, TRG has successfully structured credit insurance policies to protect exporters for their cost of goods sold risk in the case of commercial non-acceptance. This represents a very interesting application of credit insurance for commodity exporters. If you would like to discuss this idea further, please contact Gene Ferraiolo at 610.353.1785 or gene@www.traderiskgroup.com
