Coface North America CEO Christina Montes de Oca discusses how businesses can use credit information and insurance to manage customer and supplier exposure amid changing trade conditions and rising insolvencies.
For 80 years, Coface's data has driven its decisions on which clients and industries to insure. Now the trade credit insurer is making that same intelligence more broadly available to clients, betting that in a market shaped by tariffs, conflict and rising insolvencies, prevention matters as much as protection.
"Risk used to be at least somewhat predictable," said Christina Montes de Oca, Chief Executive Officer of Coface North America. "You could look at a company's financials, assess its market, and have reasonable confidence in what the next year would look like. But that is no longer the case. The current tariff environment is rewriting supply chains in real time, and insolvencies are climbing globally."
Supporting that are the numbers. In a June 2026 publication, Coface found that North American companies saw the largest rise in insolvencies of any region, up 22%, helping push the global total up 12% in early 2026. This creates a problem because when a business runs short on cash, the vendors it owes often find out last.
Coface, one of the world's leading credit insurers, is responding by expanding access to its Business Information solutions, which draw on a database of 245 million companies across 200 countries. It is the same data the company uses to decide which clients and industries it will cover.
“Our intelligence is built to surface what's coming by monitoring patterns that historically precede financial deterioration," Montes de Oca said. Because the data supports Coface's own underwriting, she added, "it has been tested against real-world outcomes over many years. ”
Reading the early signals
According to Montes de Oca, Coface’s analysis considers a combination of signals rather than any single metric.
“We look closely at payment behavior, such as delays that don't match a company's historical patterns,” Montes de Oca said. “We also track credit activity, changes in how a company manages its obligations, and sector-level trends that might be pressuring an entire category of businesses. Any one of those in isolation might not be alarming, but together, they paint a picture.”
That picture has paid off for Coface’s clients. Coface flagged financial distress at a major retailer two months before it collapsed , giving a goods distributor time to reduce its exposure and avoid millions in losses. In another case , a global software company learned that a key supplier was deteriorating months before the supplier filed for bankruptcy. The company lined up alternatives, protected its supply chain and avoided several million dollars in losses.
From alert to action
What clients do with an early warning depends on how serious the signal is and how much runway they have.
“When we flag early-stage distress, most clients use that window to reduce exposure by tightening payment terms, requiring prepayment or pulling back on order size,” Montes de Oca said. “If the picture deteriorates further, some will exit the relationship entirely.”
The companies seeing the most value, she said, are the ones that treat risk monitoring as a standing process rather than a one-time check. “The clients who benefit most are the ones who have built our alerts into their credit and procurement workflows, so that when a signal comes in, there's already a protocol for how to respond.”
Vetting partners in unfamiliar markets
Changing tariffs can alter the cost of sourcing and selling across borders. Montes de Oca says this can lead businesses to consider unfamiliar markets and partners, making checks on financial health and country conditions more important.
"When a tariff forces a company to find a new supplier quickly, they often enter markets where they have no prior experience and very limited visibility," Montes de Oca said. "We can give them an immediate risk profile on a potential partner, including financial health and any red flags in their track record. We can also layer on country-level risk context, so a company understands not just whether that specific supplier looks healthy, but whether the environment they're operating in is stable."
The same approach works on the sales side. One industrial products distributor uses Coface to automatically clear new, lower-risk customers for credit , letting it take on new business from customers with little or no historical credit profile.
Prevention first and protection when it counts
Coface offers trade credit insurance alongside its information services. Itcan indemnify companies for covered losses. A mid-sized metals and electronics recycler, for example, chose Coface's TradeLiner solution to limit its exposure to customer insolvency while it pursues growth.
But Montes de Oca said a growing share of clients now come for the intelligence as much as the coverage. Some pair the two for “both the early warning and the financial backstop if something goes wrong anyway.” Others, including companies that self-insure or have their own risk financing, want the visibility on its own.
“We think of it as meeting companies where they are,” she said. “Whether a company is looking for business information, insurance or both, the goal is the same, helping them navigate uncertainty with greater confidence.”
Credit Risk in Executive Discussions
Montes de Oca said the risk conversation with U.S. clients now starts much earlier than it did a year ago.
“A year ago, conversations were still largely reactive, where companies came to us after something went wrong, or when they were entering a new market and wanted a safety net,” she said. “Today, the conversation starts much earlier, as companies ask us to help them map their entire risk exposure across their customer base, their supply chain and more.”
Those discussions are also happening higher up. Credit, supply chain and market risk, once handled in separate corners of a business, are “increasingly reaching the CEO and CFO, because these exposures can have a direct impact on growth, profitability, and strategy,” she said.
For Coface, which serves 100,000 clients in roughly 200 markets, that shift plays directly to its strengths.
“The companies that come out stronger in this environment are the ones that can see what is coming before it arrives,” Montes de Oca said. “Coface gives them the information to act before a problem arises and the coverage to keep moving forward when one does.”