Nadaleen Singh

On June 10, rat­ing agency Stan­dard and Poor's lift­ed its cred­it out­look for the US econ­o­my from neg­a­tive to sta­ble, clear­ing the way for in­vestors to deep­en their foot­print in that mar­ket.

How­ev­er, with­out in­vest­ment cap­i­tal, the in­vestor's goals can­not be achieved.

Ex­porters As­so­ci­a­tion of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca (EAUSA) is one such in­sti­tu­tion which pro­vides fund­ing and lines of cred­it to busi­ness­es. The as­so­ci­a­tion par­tic­i­pat­ed in last week's Trade and In­vest­ment Con­ven­tion (TIC) at the Hy­att Re­gency Trinidad ho­tel, Port-of-Spain.

Its first par­tic­i­pa­tion in TIC was so suc­cess­ful­ly, it plans to re­turn in 2014.

Luis Castil­lo, chair­man and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of EAUSA, said the as­so­ci­a­tion com­pris­es mem­bers from coun­tries oth­er than the US.

He said that EAUSA pro­vides a link be­tween busi­ness­es in T&T and those in­ter­na­tion­al­ly.

"It brings tools (that can be used) in con­duct­ing busi­ness trans­ac­tions. Some of the tools are car­go in­sur­ance. We have an agree­ment with the sin­gle largest car­go com­pa­ny in the world, that's Tokyo Ma­rine."

Find­ing mon­ey

EAUSA al­so fa­cil­i­tates fi­nanc­ing.

"Some­one needs to get $50,000 cred­it. I don't need any doc­u­ment from them, just one cred­it re­port, which we take our­selves. Some­body wants more than $200,000, we ask for a cred­it re­port and two trade ref­er­ences. We don't ask for a fi­nan­cial state­ment and there is no let­ter of cred­it in­volved."

The types of busi­ness­es which have ap­proached the as­so­ci­a­tion for fund­ing in­clude busi­ness­es which buy and sell equip­ment.

Castil­lo ex­plained: "We would of­fer fi­nanc­ing for equip­ment with three or four or five years to pay back, on an in­ter­est rate of sev­en or eight per cent max­i­mum. We can go as low as three or four per cent when we deal with trans­ac­tions which are $5 mil­lion or high­er."

Castil­lo tells en­tre­pre­neurs, busi­ness pi­o­neers and cap­tains of in­dus­try that ob­tain­ing fi­nanc­ing from out­side of one's coun­try is not on­ly for large busi­ness­es or multi­na­tion­als, but al­so for small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es.

Cred­it can take as long as two weeks to grant if it is for the short term and a small trans­ac­tion like a 60-day line of cred­it for about $200,000 or less, but "when you start look­ing for bil­lions of dol­lars, to ap­prove that com­pa­ny, it takes three or four months.

"Those cas­es, when you have a large project we want to give the line of cred­it, we don't want to pe­nalise you if you don't use the funds. We don't give you the mon­ey, we give you the line of cred­it for you to buy goods and ser­vices from the Unit­ed States, so the mon­ey nev­er leaves the Unit­ed States. You get the cred­it, but you don't get the mon­ey."

"In the short-term, when it is a small trans­ac­tion, they get 100 per cent fi­nanc­ing. This is pure trade fi­nance. We ask the ex­porter to run five per cent risk and the gov­ern­ment runs 95 per cent risk, so the buy­er that re­ceives get 100 per cent of the fi­nances."

De­scrib­ing the suc­cess of the TIC, Castil­lo said: "The first day there was a slow. It was a great show, my ex­pec­ta­tions were low­er, but now it's not. Def­i­nite­ly, we are plan­ning to be here next year," Castil­lo said.

"This is the first time. We came with a small group, like an ex­per­i­ment. Next year we are go­ing to come with the em­bassy, AM­CHAM, and make some­thing nice. That's what we are look­ing for."

One of the projects which the com­pa­ny is work­ing on is about fund­ing an en­er­gy-based project worth $62 mil­lion. There's a con­struc­tion project for $300,000.

"We know T&T is go­ing to have a lot of con­struc­tion be­cause elec­tions are com­ing up, you are go­ing to see a lot of move­ment."