Most operational risk in cross-border business isn’t dramatic. That was the opening observation from Sultan Rashid Abdullah Rashid Al Shene, whose group operates between Scotland and Dubai with activity in markets across the Middle East, Europe, Asia and North America.
The small failures that cost the most
Al Shene says cross-border operations tend to fail quietly, long before anything looks like a crisis. A shipping date that drifts by two days. A customs form filled in to one country’s standard and rejected by another. A buyer who assumed an inspection would happen and a seller who assumed it had been waived. None of these are headline events. Each one costs money and time, and often the relationship behind the trade.
Companies operating across regions usually build risk frameworks around the big scenarios: a port closure, a currency shift, a regulatory change. Those matter and should be planned for. But in Al Shene’s reading, the accumulated cost of routine coordination failures across a year typically exceeds what any single headline event would do. Routine mismatch rarely gets its own budget line, and that’s exactly why it piles up.
Documentation as risk work, not admin
Sultan Rashid Abdullah Rashid Al Shene argues this gets the ordering backwards. In cross-border trade, the paperwork is where a problem first surfaces and often where it’s cheapest to fix. A health certificate prepared alongside the goods, not after them, keeps a container moving instead of sitting at a port while someone chases a stamp.
Al Shene favours structures where export documents are prepared in parallel with the physical goods, by people whose job is the paperwork and nothing else. When documentation is its own operating area, with its own staff and standards, the small errors that cause the biggest delays don’t accumulate unnoticed.
Payment terms as part of the risk architecture, says Sultan Rashid Abdullah Rashid Al Shene
Al Shene also treats payment structures as operational risk rather than as a finance question handled separately. A 30% advance by telegraphic transfer against a bill of lading isn’t only a cash flow arrangement. It’s a shared commitment that distributes the risk of the transaction, rather than loading it onto whichever party is less able to absorb a loss. For large volumes, an irrevocable letter of credit does similar work, with a bank standing between the parties.
In Al Shene’s view, payment terms that match the actual risk profile of a shipment do more to prevent disputes than any amount of contract drafting after the fact. A supplier working on partial advance with a defined trigger for the balance has different incentives than one working on open terms.
Why coordination beats contingency
Al Shene argues that most cross-border risk frameworks share a structural weakness. They’re written by people thinking about the worst cases, so they prepare for rare events and leave the daily work to habit. The companies that hold up over years of trading across regions tend to invest in coordination quality instead: the handovers between sourcing and processing, the briefings between the shipping desk and the customer, and clear agreements on what each party owes the other by when.
What this points to
For Sultan Rashid Abdullah Rashid Al Shene, operational risk in cross-border business is a coordination problem before it becomes a crisis problem.
Businesses that survive years of trading across regions are usually the ones that treated the routine work of alignment as the real risk discipline.