Home Executive Interviews DP World’s Sinan Ozcan on Rewriting the Rules of Trade Finance
Author: Chloe Domat | Photos: Shutterstock
The case for financing trade through DP World — a company that also moves the cargo.
Since joining DP World in 2021, Sinan Ozcan has built a trade finance business from the ground up within one of the world’s largest end-to-end logistics providers — a company that has grown to more than 120,000 employees from 56,000 in that time.
By embedding finance directly into the flow of goods, DP World can verify cargo in real time, detect fraud, and extend capital to clients that conventional banks routinely overlook.
In this interview, Ozcan, senior executive officer and board director at DP World Trade Finance, explains how that model works — and where it is headed next.
Global Finance: How have the recent events in the MENA region affected your operations?
Sinan Ozcan : Our global network and integrated end-to-end logistics model continue to provide resilience and flexibility across the region. Ports remain operational, and we have significantly scaled our inland logistics capabilities. We provide bonded corridors from port to inland locations, 24/7 tracking, and we prioritize essential cargo. Trade finance is an integral part of our global strategy to provide our clients with a one-stop solution to handle trade. DP World trade finance continues to support existing and new clients. We are fully operational in our lending business.
GF: What are some of the lessons learned from this crisis in the Gulf?
Ozcan : It actually confirmed the validity of our strategy. Several years ago, our clients were mainly shipping lines, and our revenue came almost exclusively from the port business. We realized that embedding trade finance into cargo movement was something difficult for traditional banks to understand, but a massive opportunity for us. Today, we go way beyond shipping lines, meaning we deal with warehousing, forwarding, and shipping from factory floor to customer’s door. DP World basically handles trade end-to-end and finds the route that makes sense for the client. We are fast, quick, and agile.
GF: What was the original idea behind DP World Trade Finance, and how has it evolved?
Ozcan : Almost 10 years ago, when DP World started its transformation journey, it was obvious to us that global supply chains were quite fragile and that this was impacting overall trade. When I joined in 2021 to set up the trade finance business, DP World had 56,000 employees; today, we have more than 120,000.
It’s a massive transformation that is happening all around the world. In the last two and a half years, we have also acquired several companies and opened over 200 logistics and forwarding offices, all across the globe.
That transformation required understanding the ultimate clients: the companies that actually manufacture, trade, retail, and wholesale the cargo, what we call cargo owners. So first, when your client base changes from shipping lines to cargo owners, it requires a lot of agility from factory floor to customer door.
But even that was not enough, because when we asked our clients, How can we help you more? They mentioned infrastructure and access to finance as their main challenges. That’s how we decided to start our trade finance business. We wanted to do it differently: by understanding where the gaps lie, creating solutions and making trade finance more inclusive and transparent.
GF: What is an underestimated risk, and how do you detect it?
Ozcan : The traditional banking method is to look at balance sheets, but we think that a very big risk in trade is fraud and collusion. It’s not entirely visible to banks what’s going on in a trade route. For example, you have a buyer and a seller, but do they really exchange the goods? Do they actually trade or collude? That’s a major risk. To de-risk that, we embed trade finance into logistics and the supply chain. We link the money flow as much as possible to the flow of goods.
If you’re a bank today, you would receive a bill of lading—a transport document—which should serve as evidence of the trade you financed. But it can be fake, forged, lost, you name it. That creates a lot of uncertainty.
As a global logistics provider, we have visibility into more than 90% of global container movements in real time. When we receive a bill of lading, whether or not we are handling the cargo, we can verify that the cargo is present and track it. That gives us a massive view and transparency to minimize the risk of fraud and collusion.
GF: How do you then de-risk trade finance?
Ozcan : There is also a misperception of trade finance as a rather riskier asset class. That is because traditional banking methods are not able to distinguish good apples from the bad ones, and they apply heavy collateral across the board. But a company cannot have unlimited collateral if it wants to keep growing. For tha...