Just like Lloyd's founding members, today's financiers provide a variety of loan and insurance products and services to millions of exporters around the world, all the while calculating the risk factors and time frames involved, and seizing opportunities for profit. Or it could mean providing a medium-term loan or leasing arrangement to a company that exports heavy machinery. Exporters have very special consider-ations and requirements, and tailoring financial solutions to match them is what this complex segment of the financial services industry is all about. Providing these and other related services has proven lucrative indeed for the Canadian financial services industry. That is the highest ratio recorded by any nation in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Canadian exporters look to a variety of sources for their financing requirements.
In addition to the banks, credit unions also provide a range of export financing options, as do the Canadian subsidiaries of the larger general-insurance groups. And then there are the 30 or so major factoring companies in Canada, all of which assist exporters by enhancing liquidity through invoice discounting. Like every other leading industrialized nation, Canada also has a government agency designed to provide exporters of all sizes and in all industrial sectors with the best terms possible. It's Canada's secret trade weapon. My goal is to make it less of a secret and more of a weapon.