From trade floor to governance: A career in global trade operations

The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of ICC Academy or ICC.

About the interviewee:

Aftab Ahmed is Deputy General Manager and Head of Operations Governance & Control at HBL Singapore, with nearly two decades of experience across trade operations, systems implementation, and governance.

Most careers in trade finance start on the floor – processing transactions, reconciling balances, scrutinising documents. Fewer evolve into strategic oversight of entire operational frameworks across international branches.

Aftab Ahmed has done both. Now Deputy General Manager and Head of Operations Governance & Control at HBL Singapore, he has spent nearly two decades at HBL progressing from trade manager to leading governance across the bank’s international network – implementing trade processing systems, designing MIS frameworks, standardising document scrutiny, and training teams on UCP 600 and TBML controls.

In this interview, he talks through what the transition from operations to governance actually looks like, what he learned from rolling out systems across Pakistan and multiple international territories, and what he’d tell anyone starting out in trade finance today.

From trade floor to governance

How does a career in trade operations evolve into strategic oversight?

As DGM and Head Operations Governance & Control at HBL Singapore, what does a typical day look like overseeing trade operations across international branches?

My morning always starts with the previous day’s work. The first thing I check is the trade processing interface report. If there’s a misposting, a system error, or an unprocessed entry, it surfaces there, and anything unprocessed needs to be rectified straight away.

Next, I reconcile outstanding balances against my trade transactions. We run two systems Trade Processing System and core banking system, so I pull reports from both and match them. Anything posted in Trade Processing system should also appear in the core banking system. Any discrepancy needs to be fixed quickly, because it can lead to unbalanced posting or override a customer’s limit.

After that, I check incoming payments. We receive various export payments daily, so I go through the MT950 statement against the documents we’ve sent out to issuing banks. Some are sight payments that should come in by the fifth or sixth working day; some are claim reimbursements due on value date; and some are usance payments now falling due. Once I’ve confirmed receipt, we inform the customer, debit our nostro, and credit their account.

There are also trade finance sell-down transactions to manage. For example, with forfaiting, we may have sold a bill maturing after 180 days to one of our network branches in overseas network or to another bank, and taken the funds upfront. If the due date is today, I can’t actually see the funds in our nostro until the next day because the US business day starts late in the evening. But the responsibility still has to be settled today, so we manage to pay the investor their share with the upcoming markup under reserve, which avoids incurring an extra day’s payment.

Those are the previous day’s items. Then I move into present day’s work: how many transfers have come in after the cut-off, what’s still pending, and whether the LCs issued overnight by other countries for advising have come through in our trade processing system so we can start processing them.

If I had to summarise it concisely, a typical day is governance, balancing, reconciliation, and managing the flow of work at the start of the day.

You’ve spent nearly two decades at HBL, progressing from Trade Manager to leading operations governance. Looking back, which role or project taught you the most about how trade operations really work?

In Pakistan, I was working in the Centralized Trade Operations, which had a staff of over 100 people across the Karachi centres. At one point I was in the import section, and they started involving me in various projects on the side. So, while I was still in the import department, I was taking on a lot of other work in parallel.

The real turning point came when a new senior head joined to oversee trade, treasury, SWIFT, and remittances. After interviewing several people, he asked me to come and sit with him. He was at General Manager level, so working closely with him meant I was effectively overseeing the whole trade operation, including both our trade processing centres in Lahore and Karachi, the departmental issues, and the reconciliations.

That taught me a huge amount. When you’re working in a single department, your view is narrow. You focus on what’s in front of you.

But when you’re seeing the picture from the top, you understand how one department’s work connects to another’s: how import links to export, how guarantees fit in, and so on.

On top of that, I was involved with what was then called the digital trade portal, which is now FBCC. It lets customers initiate trade transactions and view their outstanding transactions directly from their office or laptop. Because we also had to market the product, my boss often had me go out with the relationship managers to visit customers, demonstrate how the system worked, and walk them through the benefits.

That’s what made it a complete package for me. You start at the processing level, inputting transactions. Then you move up to overseeing the whole department. And then you sit on the other side of the table with the customer, hearing what’s beneficial to them. Getting all three perspectives taught me the most about how trade operations really work.

You’ve managed operations in both Pakistan and Singapore. Can you share a specific example of how the same trade transaction might be handled differently in these two locations?

That’s a good question. In Pakistan, we operate under several restrictions in order to better govern and control our FX reserves, so there are controls around imports. Historically we had the I-Form process, and today we have PSW – the Pakistan Single Window.

Before a customer comes to the bank to request an import LC, they first need to register the import with the customs authority through PSW. That system is interconnected with the banks and the port authorities. Once that’s done, the customer comes to the bank, and we then need to confirm that sufficient liquidity is available, particularly for major transactions or large LCs in a specific currency. We have to abide by FX rules, customs rules, and several other requirements. For example, the insurance must be covered within Pakistan; CIF is not allowed, so the insurance can’t be covered by the exporter.

Singapore, on the other hand, is a free economy, so there’s no equivalent restriction. The emphasis shifts to trade-based money laundering controls and best practices. Third-port shipments are allowed, and insurance can be taken either by the end buyer or the seller. There’s no FX limit and none of the liquidity-side restrictions, but because it’s a free economy, we need strong controls on the compliance side: screening of goods and vessels etc, and a much heavier focus on TBML.

So, in short: in Pakistan, the focus is on liquidity, FX rules, TBML and customs registration. In Singapore, it shifts almost entirely to compliance, trade-based money laundering controls and best practices.

Leading transformation in global trade operations

How do banks successfully implement new trade systems across multiple countries?

You’ve led the implementation of Trade Processing Systems and FBCC across Pakistan and international territories. Can you take us through one memorable moment during these rollouts – maybe a challenge that forced you to rethink your approach?

Let me go back to 2017. I went to one of our new international branches, to roll out the older version of Trade processing system there that was a Windows-based desktop application.
 
The first realisation was that we couldn’t just replicate what we had in Pakistan. The moment you go into another country, the product mix changes. That branch was much more export-oriented, doing various types of financing, so I had to develop a different set of products for them.
 
I sat down with the product person they’d hired in trade operations, and they would just give me the name of a product, for example forfaiting, which we weren’t doing in Pakistan. I’d then have to research how it worked and configure it within the system so they could process it smoothly. I also built in some automation: instead of inputting the whole SWIFT message manually, I set up specific fields on the system with a pre-embedded SWIFT template, so the message could be generated automatically.
 
The initial reaction to any new system is resistance. People are used to whatever they had at their previous bank, and now they’re being asked to work in something completely different. But once you build the product around their actual requirements and show them how to process it easily, the perception shifts. They start to see that this is going to make their work easier, and from there they’re much more willing to engage.

The moment that really made me rethink my approach came during a training session at one of our locations. They told me they had a lot of trade business, but it wasn’t reflecting in our system. When I dug in, I realised they were processing a few specific types of Trade Transactions through their core banking system instead of the trade processing system so business was not recorded as Trade Business.
 
After a two-day Zoom training, I committed to developing the relevant products in their Trade Processing system for them. Once those went live and the team started processing designated products in trade processing system, the picture changed completely. Where head office reports had previously shown only 40 to 50 transactions a month for that location, the number jumped to 300 to 400.
 
The manager was genuinely shocked, not because the business had suddenly grown, but because the existing business had finally become visible in the proper system.
 
That’s the kind of moment that really shapes how you approach an implementation.

It’s not just about deploying the technology; it’s about understanding what business is actually happening on the ground and making sure the system captures it.

When you’re introducing a new trade system to a branch that’s been doing things a certain way for years, what’s your strategy for getting the team on board?

Honestly, it’s quite hard. Everyone is in their comfort zone with whatever system they’re using. They know every shortcut, every keystroke, every screen. So when we moved from the older version of Trade processing system which is desktop based application to newer web based version, it was a real shift: one is a desktop application, the other is web-based, so the look and feel is completely different.

The first thing I had to do was get users familiar with the new interface. Working in a web-based system also brings browser-related behaviours that are a learning curve in themselves.

My first move is always to show people the features that genuinely benefit them. In the older desktop application, running a report could take five or ten minutes; you’d be stuck waiting. In the new system, you trigger the report, carry on with your work, and a minute or two later the output is sitting in the jobs queue, ready for you. Once they see that kind of time saving in action, the resistance starts to soften.

The second thing I do during implementation is ask them directly: what papers, advices, and documents do you need to send to your customers? The older system wasn’t flexible enough to produce everything in the format customers wanted, so branches were doing manual edits on every advice, printing it, fixing the formatting, and only then sharing it. That’s a huge time sink and a source of errors.

The newer technology gives you much more flexibility, so I use that. I gather their actual requirements upfront and build the templates so the advice comes out in the correct format and can go straight to PDF. Once people see that their workload is genuinely lower, they start to feel the system is friendly to them.

That’s the key. It’s not about telling people, “This is better, learn it.” It’s about showing them that it’s beneficial.

No system will satisfy 100% of needs, but once people feel it’s working in their favour, they start taking real interest in learning it. They want to explore more, and that’s when adoption really takes off.

The other thing I’d add is that you have to speak to people at their level. Because I’ve come up through processing, I can speak to a processor in their language. I can sit with an authoriser and talk about what they care about, which is accuracy. And I can sit with management and talk about what they care about, which is reporting and decision-making. Each group has different concerns, and tailoring the conversation is what gets everyone on board.

What’s the most unexpected obstacle you’ve encountered when implementing trade operations systems across different countries, and how did you navigate it?

The most unexpected obstacle ties back to the location I mentioned earlier – discovering that a branch’s actual trade business doesn’t match what the system shows. It taught me about implementing trade systems across countries.

You can’t assume the system you’re rolling out covers what the branch is actually doing day to day. The business is happening; it’s just sitting in the wrong system, invisible to head office and absent from the MIS. So management ends up making decisions on incomplete data without even knowing it.  

The way you navigate it is to go in, understand the branch’s real workflow, find out what they’re processing outside the trade system and why, and then build the products to bring all of that into one place.  Once you do, the business doesn’t change, but suddenly it’s visible, accountable, and reportable.

The unexpected obstacle is rarely the technology itself. It’s the gap between what you assume the branch does and what it actually does.

Governance, control, and continuous improvement

How do banks maintain operational excellence while managing risk?

Can you give us an example of a trade process you re-engineered? What prompted the change, and what was the outcome?

On the system side, I’ve developed many products over the years, but from a process point of view, the best example is the re-engineering we did around export document scrutiny at one of our locations.

The team there was receiving a lot of export documents and scrutinising them, but there was no standard checklist. Every staff member approached the documents differently. One person would start from the top of the LC, another from the commercial invoice, a third would jump straight to the bill of lading. The scrutiny was inconsistent, and so was the way discrepancies were recorded.

What I did was design a standardised checklist. Once a document came in, the team had to follow a fixed sequence.

• Check the LC number and the amount.

• Check the expiry date and the shipment date.

• Check the document requirements.

• Check the additional conditions and the presentation period.

Once the process was streamlined, discrepancies came out in identical structure. If something was wrong at checkpoint one, it was logged as discrepancy 1. If something was wrong at checkpoint three, it was logged as 3.3. That standardisation also gave us a usable database of discrepancies.

The second outcome was something we hadn’t initially planned for. After reviewing the discrepancy memos over a 15-day period, we started to see patterns. Certain customers were repeatedly making the same mistakes. One would consistently have errors on their certificate of origin. Another would consistently have errors on their invoices. Each instance cost us time, because we’d have to go back to the customer, ask for the corrected document, wait for them to reissue it, and only then continue processing.

So we went back to those customers and educated them. We showed them the specific document errors their team was making on a regular basis and explained the downstream impact, including payment delays of two or three days. Once they understood that, the quality of incoming documents improved.

The outcome was two folds. Our scrutiny process became faster because the checklist was standardised and the team wasn’t reinventing the approach for every document. And the documents we were receiving from customers were cleaner, which meant first-time straight-through processing improved, and payments came in faster from the issuing bank.

You’ve designed MIS systems to help management make better decisions. Can you share a time when the data revealed something surprising about your trade operations?

The first example connects back to what I shared earlier. When one of our locations was processing open account and advance payment transactions through their core banking system instead of Trade processing system, our monthly trade MIS was showing only 40 or 50 transactions a month for that location.

The surprise wasn’t that the numbers were low; it was realising that the real volume was being hidden because the transactions weren’t flowing through the trade system. Once I developed the products inside Trade processing system and the team started processing properly, the MIS immediately reflected the actual business and the same location jumped to 200 or 300 transactions a month. I had to explain to management that the business itself hadn’t grown; it had just finally become visible in the right system.

The second example came from customer-level MIS. I run a lot of MIS slices, by customer, by country, by bank. When you look at customer patterns over time, you sometimes see something that should prompt action. One customer was doing strong volumes for the first three months of the year, then their activity dropped off significantly over the next two months. We flagged the pattern, passed it to the marketing team and the RMs, and they reached out to check whether there was a service issue or something else we could help with. If a customer is usually doing 20 transactions a month and suddenly drops to 5, you want to get in front of that before it becomes a churn issue. MIS isn’t just about reporting; it’s an early warning system for the business team.

The third example is more sensitive. Around 2017 or 2018, when we were running branch-wise MIS in Pakistan, we noticed an exponential increase in trade business for a few specific branches that weren’t traditionally trade branches. That stood out. We flagged it to the business and compliance teams, who reviewed the activity and did their own R&D. It turned out there was suspicious activity behind that growth. So in that case, MIS effectively acted as an early warning indicator and helped surface something malicious that needed to be addressed.

So, the surprises ranged from hidden volume the system wasn’t capturing, to customer behaviour patterns pointing to relationship risk, to anomalous branch growth that turned out to be a compliance red flag. In each case, the data didn’t just inform decisions; it changed what management chose to act on.

The trainer’s perspective

What role does knowledge transfer play in building strong trade operations?

You’ve trained teams on Trade processing systems, FBCC, and trade-based money laundering. As a Certified UCP 600 specialist, what’s one documentary credit rule or principle that people most often misunderstand, and how do you help them grasp it?

The principle people most often misunderstand, especially newer staff, is the one set out in UCP 600 that banks deal in documents, not in goods, services, or performance.

The rule is straightforward in theory. Banks are not involved in the transportation of the goods or in the underlying commercial transaction. Their role is to deal in the documents. If you’ve issued an import LC and you receive documents that are in order, you pay. If you’re on the advising or negotiating side and the documents are in order, you dispatch them to the issuing bank.

What I see happening, particularly with people who’ve come into trade more recently, is that the momentum has shifted heavily towards the compliance side. TBML controls, sanctions screening, country risk appetite, bank risk appetite, all of these have rightly become a major part of how we process trade. But the side effect is that newer practitioners often anchor their entire understanding of trade around compliance, and the underlying UCP 600 principle of dealing in documents gets pushed into the background.

So when I’m training teams, my approach is to bring it back to the fundamentals. Yes, you absolutely need to perform TBML checks, screen for sanctions, and apply the bank’s risk guidelines. Those are non-negotiable. But on top of that compliance layer, the documentary examination itself still has to be done properly, and that examination is governed by UCP 600. The two things sit together. One does not replace the other.

The way I help people grasp it is to walk them through real examples where the documents are clean from a UCP standpoint but raise a TBML concern, and other examples where the documents have a clear discrepancy but no compliance issue. Going through those cases side by side makes it clearer that the two checks serve different purposes and have to be applied independently. Once people see that distinction, they stop treating UCP 600 as a secondary consideration and start applying it properly alongside the compliance work.

Read: Evolution of UCP 600 and its impact on documentary credits

When you’re training a team that includes both junior staff and experienced trade officers, how do you pitch the content so everyone gets value from it?

I have a specific strategy for mixed groups, and it’s shaped by the fact that I started right at the bottom myself, so I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a training session as a junior.

I always start with the basics. The basic definitions, the basic concepts. I don’t put a definition on the table and tell people they need to abide by it. I approach it with a bit of empathy and let people know I’ve been in their shoes. That makes it much easier for the junior staff to absorb the content, because they’re not feeling talked down to.

The second part of my strategy is to actively bring the experienced people in the room into the conversation. As I’m going through the material, I’ll give a live example to illustrate a point, then turn to the senior trade officers in the group and ask if they have a similar example from their own experience. There are usually two or three who jump in and share something specific from their career.

That does two things at once. It makes the senior people feel valued, because they’re not just sitting through content they already know. And it gives the junior staff a layer of learning they couldn’t get from me alone, because they’re hearing real stories from practitioners who’ve spent decades doing this work.

The other benefit is that the conversation becomes much more open. People start talking, sharing, comparing notes. The junior staff feel comfortable enough to ask questions, and the seniors build a kind of mentoring relationship with them inside the session itself. By the end of it, knowledge transfer is happening in two directions, not just from me at the front of the room.

So the short version is; start with the fundamentals so juniors aren’t lost, bring the seniors in as co-contributors so they’re not bored, and let the room teach itself as much as possible.

The future of operations

What’s changing in how banks process and govern trade transactions?

With AI and automation reshaping how trade operations are run, where do you see the balance between technology and experienced practitioners?

I’m always supportive of automation. It helps enormously, particularly with high-volume document scrutiny. If I’m receiving a hundred invoices in a day, all in a similar pattern, an automated system can process them within few minutes. The same task done manually takes far longer. For repetitive, high-volume work, the case for automation is clear.

But it’s important to understand what AI actually requires. You have to train the system extensively. For every new type of invoice that comes in, you need to teach the system where the applicant name sits, where the beneficiary name sits, where the goods description is. That training has to happen continuously; it isn’t a one-time setup.

The other limitation is that whenever a genuinely new situation comes up, AI doesn’t solve it for you. You have to go back to experienced people and ask for their help. If you’re receiving a large transaction where every invoice is structured differently each time, the system needs specific learning for each variation, including which pick points to look at and how to identify discrepancies in that format. There’s no match for experience in that scenario.

So the way I see the balance is this. For the usual flow of documents, where the patterns are familiar and the volume is high, automation is the right answer and it will continue to expand. But for the new, the unusual, and the genuinely complex, experienced practitioners remain essential. They’re the ones who handle the situations the system hasn’t been trained for yet, and they’re the ones who teach the system how to handle them in future.

If you were starting your career in trade operations today, what would you focus on learning first to set yourself up for long-term success?

The first thing I’d say is that whenever you start a job, you have to work with the core of your heart. Nothing is too small or too big. If your boss gives you a specific task, do it properly. There’s real value in taking ownership of whatever’s in front of you, regardless of how junior it feels.

The second thing is to listen to your peers. If people around you have been doing the work for a while, they’ll have developed shortcuts and efficient ways of getting things done. Learn those from them. There’s no point reinventing the wheel when the people next to you already know the fastest way through.

The third thing is to think outside the box. After your processing is done, look at what the authoriser is doing. What checks are they performing? What mistakes are they consistently catching on your work? If the same kind of error keeps coming back to you, that’s a signal to improve. Use it.

The fourth thing, and this is something I’d emphasise strongly to anyone starting out, is to read the guidelines properly. UCP 600, URR, ISBP, the various publications. Don’t treat them as reference material to look up when you need it. Read them, understand them, and internalise them. Tied to that, take your certifications early. Completing the relevant ones in the early years of your career accelerates your progression significantly. Strong academic and professional credentials reflect on your CV, give your work weight, and open doors much faster than experience alone will.

The fifth area is the system itself. Don’t just learn how to use the trade system as a user; learn how it behaves underneath. If you understand the system, you can have a proper conversation with your IT colleagues about what’s working and what isn’t. You can suggest changes that make life easier for everyone. If you need a particular MIS output, you can articulate exactly what you want and why. That ability to bridge the operations and technology sides makes you genuinely valuable inside any bank.

So to summarise: work with heart, learn from your peers, think beyond your own task, read the rulebooks and get certified early, and understand the system as deeply as you understand the process.

And the reason all of this matter is credibility. When you have the certifications, when you know the rules, when you understand the system, your emails carry weight. Your explanations carry weight. People listen. That’s what sets you up for the long term.