Proparco, a Development Finance Institution partly owned by the French Development Agency (AFD), has as main mission to promote private investment in Africa. It is with this institution that on 03 February in Douala, Afriland First Bank, a leading bank in Cameroon, is signing a guarantee agreement for an amount of 15 million euros, approximately 10 billion CFA francs. This guarantee aims to boost trade finance operations in the bank's portfolio and the country as a whole.

Trade finance, according to finance experts, is a set of techniques and financial products designed to finance and facilitate international trade operations. The main financial instruments used for such operations are documentary credit (Credoc) and documentary remittance (Remdoc). “A documentary credit is any commitment made by a bank on behalf of a third party (originator) or for itself, to pay a beneficiary (service provider, vendor, supplier, etc.) a given amount of money upon presentation of certain documents (import or export, editor's note) within a specified period of time agreed upon in the contract,” Afriland First Bank explains on its website. The same source confirms a “documentary remittance is a type of fund payment or receipt method whereby the exporter instructs his bank to remit the documents to the importer's bank”.

Source: Business in Cameroon