Trade credit

Most businesses sell on credit: goods now, payment in 30, 60 or 90 days. Trade credit insurance covers the seller when the buyer does not pay, because they went bankrupt, became insolvent, simply never paid, or were prevented from paying by their government.

This module has a shape the other seven coverage lines do not, and it is worth grasping before you read the model. The insured is the seller. The risk being underwritten is the buyer, who is not a party to the policy and may not know it exists. So the record describes a company that never signed anything, which is why Debtor carries financial statements, a credit rating and a parent company. The insurer is underwriting a stranger’s balance sheet.

Page	What it holds
Trade credit: data model	The entities, fields, enumerated values and relationships
Trade credit: API	The endpoints, the flow that binds a policy, the lifecycle and the error paths

How the model is shaped

tradeCreditCoverage is the policy and debtor is the buyer whose failure to pay is the insured event.

tradeCreditType says how much of the seller’s book is covered. Whole turnover covers every customer. Key accounts covers the largest few. Single buyer covers one. Transactional covers one shipment. The choice drives everything about how the policy is administered.

tradeCreditPeril is the four causes of non-payment that count: bankruptcy, insolvency, protracted default (the buyer has simply not paid for long enough that the debt is treated as bad), and political risk.

Three numbers do the work. creditLimit is the most the insurer will cover against that buyer. creditLimitUtilized is how much of it is currently in use, so the headroom is the difference. maxCreditPeriod is the longest payment term the cover allows, in days, and invoicing a buyer on terms longer than that puts the debt outside the policy.

waitingPeriod is how long an unpaid debt must stay unpaid before it can be claimed. Protracted default is a matter of time passing rather than of an event happening, so the policy needs a threshold.

What to watch

This module now carries the standard policy lifecycle. inceptionDate, expiryDate, status and the premium, brokerage and endorsement fields are all present, with the same names, types and value sets they carry on every other coverage type. An implementation that already handles motor or property handles these unchanged.

Two names are misspelled on the wire and stay that way. The type enumeration is tradeCreditTpe and the utilisation field is creditLimitUtiilized with a doubled i. Both are in every existing implementation, so send them as written. A third, entitytype with a lowercase t, is shown corrected here.

Political risk overlaps with a separate product. tradeCreditPeril code 3 is political risk, and the product catalogue also carries political risk insurance as a line of its own. The boundary between the two is not drawn. Decide which one you are selling before you rely on the peril.

There is no waiting-period state. The field exists and nothing signals entering or leaving it. Treat it as a calculation against the loss date when a claim is filed rather than as something the policy record tracks.

Market profiles

This module is market-neutral. Nothing it defines varies by market, so no profile constrains it.