For ICBA's global team, when implementing long-term trade credit insurance solutions, winning isn’t everything; competing is

By Rob Downey

A successful NCAA Division I and U.S. Olympic men’s basketball coach is reputed to have said, "I don’t recruit winners." Instead, he looked for the competitive kid, the one who indicated a willingness to prepare daily for a chance to succeed at a more intense challenge than any previously experienced.

If you have learned nothing else in coming through the global financial downturn, you have learned at least what the famous coach implied: "winners" are a dime a dozen. That is, many of the people in your purview – whether peers, supervisors, clients, lenders, or underwriters – were winners in 2007, i.e., they were at their best when times were good. Some of these erstwhile winners were probably “found out” during the 2008-09 crisis, uncovered by the advent of hardening circumstances.

Competitors, on the contrary, are a durable and empowering resource for everyone on a team, and by devotion and relentless effort they provide a secure stay against confusion even in the most trying times.

As we climb slowly back to a new-normal in the trade finance and credit insurance industry, remember who the toughest competitors within your professional ambit were over the past twenty months and endeavor to take special note of them in 2010. Whether with a resource allocation, a bonus, a sabbatical, public praise, a private word of thanks, or a shared lunch, acknowledge the top competitors on your team.

"The past is prologue," say the poets, but the past is nevertheless a poor predictor of the exact moment and full momentum of the worst catastrophes. So it was with September 2008 in our risk-spreading industry; so it will be next time. We are surprised by the arrival of the worst happenings; surprised again by their intensity; yet again by their duration. The credit insurance industry has made it through the worst of it for now. Well the competitors have, anyway. And, though B.B. King lamented, "the thrill is gone", let’s consider that a good thing, for a time, in global trade and the trade finance industry.

ICBA celebrated its Tenth Anniversary at a gathering in Paris last month. ICBA is a global organization of truly competitive individuals, most of them owners of the credit insurance brokerages they started. My colleagues in every corner of the world are still thriving in the industry, not because they have won, once and for all, but because they played the game in 2008 and 2009 to the best of their ability when it mattered the most. Billions in claims were paid; thousands of buyer limits were defended by great advocacy in the most trying situations; coverages, by and large, proved valuable when tested.

As with all true competitors, my ICBA partners and peers feel the game is always afoot, out there waiting to be defined anew. Give your local ICBA broker a call to find out what they can do to help you compete better in the seasons to come, come what may.

(Rob Downey is one of the founding partners of International Risk Consultants, Inc. (IRC) www.irc-group.com – a globally-integrated trade-finance and credit insurance specialty brokerage, which serves as the operating member of ICBA for Asia, Brazil, India and the USA)