In our last article we looked at how Ship Owners were attracting financial investments through innovating their product offering and slowly catching up with the digital age. This commentary will now focus on the softer skills required in dealing with marine money; the importance of good contacts and relationship management to help build trust in transactions.
The historic Baltic Exchange placed great importance on reliance at a global scale, with its moto being ‘our word is our bond’. Whilst the Baltic Exchange has seen many market shifts and recently been bought by Singaporean investors, its foundations on good business networks still holds great relevance.
With today’s instant communication era and 24/7 satellite monitoring, the concept of keeping track of only 52,000 global commercial trading vessels, its cargo, the associated cashflows and the people controlling it should be relatively easy; however, this is surprisingly not the case for such a small industry in terms of stakeholders. Whilst the world seems to be shrinking there are still lots of places to hide in the deep blue sea.