ICC appoints Senior Advisor to the Banking Commission

Mr Beck’s role as Senior Advisor to the commission – a global forum and rule-making body for the banking community – will put him at the frontier between business and policy-making, as well as at the forefront of policy relating to credit risk management.

Mr Beck draws on extensive experience in the field of international finance. He began his career as a special assistant to the former Canadian minister for international trade, Michael Wilson, dealing with issues related to Canada’s export credit agency, Export Development Canada. He subsequently spent over six years with Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) where he was senior manager for trade finance, originating and structuring a wide variety of short- and medium-term transactions largely focused on Latin America.

Beck then left CIBC to help start a new multilateral development bank, Black Sea Trade & Development Bank (BSTDB), where he focused on Turkey, Russia and former Soviet Union countries.  Following four years at BSTDB, he had various assignments as a senior consultant, including with USAID working in southern Africa and a start-up financial institution in Armenia. Steven is on the G20 and World Trade Organization working groups for trade finance. He is also on the Asian Editorial Board of Global Trade Review, a UK-based publication.

As part of ADB, Mr Beck managed exponential growth within ADB’s trade finance business and initiated the ICC-ADB Trade Finance Default Register, which accumulated information on more than five million trade finance transactions, evidencing a 0.02% probability of default. This ongoing project argues for appropriate capital treatment for trade finance transactions by presenting data and statistics to the Basel Secretariat.

“It is an honour to be nominated as the Senior Advisor of the ICC Banking Commission,” said Mr Beck. “It is crucial for ICC and business in general to engage in constructive dialogue with key policymakers and regulators. ICC is well positioned to be a leading voice of the global economy and it is my intention to help the ICC Banking Commission build the right relationships and partnerships on key regulatory issues.”

“The ICC Banking Commission is a leading, global rule-making body for the banking industry, producing universally accepted rules and guidelines for international banking practice. ICC’s voluntary market-based approaches have often been praised for levelling the playing field in trade finance practices,” said ICC Secretary General Jean-Guy Carrier. “Today, it is important to take a broader policy-making approach to reinforce our position as a leading forum for the banking industry and to determine the ways banking will be conducted in the future. Mr Beck is ideally placed to foster our dialogue in the policy sphere and I am pleased to see this new expansion of ICC Banking Commission leadership.”

With more than 500 members in 85 countries, many of them emerging, the Banking Commission is the largest ICC Commission.

As of today, the ICC Banking Commission executive officers are:

Kah Chye Tan Chair, Global Head of Corporate Cash and Trade, Transaction Banking,Standard Chartered Bank, Singapore

• Georges Affaki Vice-Chair, Member of the Executive Committee and Global Head of Structured Finance, CIB Legal, BNP Paribas, France
• Steven BeckBanking Commission Senior Advisor, Head of Trade Finance, Asian Development Bank
• Gary Collyer Banking Commission Senior Technical Advisor, Founder Collyer Consulting, UK
• Dan Taylor Vice-Chair, Executive Director, TSS Global Market Infrastructures, JPMorgan
• Alexander ZelenovVice-Chair, Director, Financial Institutions Department, Vnesheconombank, Russia
• Yanling Zhang Vice-Chair, Executive Vice President, Bank of China, China