When people ask me what determines whether a cross-border financial relationship succeeds, they usually expect me to talk about deal terms. Pricing, structure, security, governing law: the machinery of the transaction.
Those things matter, and getting them wrong can sink a deal on its own. But after spending two decades structuring capital raises across dozens of countries, I have come to a conclusion that would have surprised my younger self.
The terms are rarely what decide whether a cross-border relationship holds up. Trust is. And trust behaves very differently once a border runs through the middle of a deal.
Distance changes everything
Within a single market, a great deal of trust is supplied by the environment. Both sides share a legal system, a regulator, a set of business norms, and often a common set of intermediaries who have worked with each other before.
If something goes wrong, everyone knows roughly how it will be resolved and who can be called. That shared context does an enormous amount of quiet work, and because it is invisible, it is easy to take for granted.
Once you cross a border, much of that scaffolding disappears. Legal systems differ, enforcement differs, accounting conventions differ, and the informal norms that govern how people behave under stress can differ most of all.
The counterparties may have never met in person. The intermediaries on each side may not know one another. In that environment, the trust that a domestic deal borrows from its surroundings has to be built deliberately between the people involved.
This is the central fact of cross-border finance, and it took me years to fully appreciate it.
Why terms cannot substitute for trust
The natural response to uncertainty is to write more into the contract. If you cannot rely on shared norms, the thinking goes, then specify everything: every contingency, every remedy, every obligation.
I understand the impulse, and detailed documentation certainly has its place. But I have watched heavily negotiated, airtight agreements fail across borders, and I have watched comparatively simple ones succeed. The difference almost never came down to the quality of the drafting.
The reason is that a contract is only as good as the willingness and ability to enforce it, and across borders both of those are uncertain.
Enforcement may be slow, expensive, or practically unavailable. More importantly, a deal that has reached the point of enforcement has usually already failed in every way that matters.
What actually carries a cross-border relationship through the inevitable surprises is not the remedy clause. It is whether each side believes the other will act in good faith when something unexpected happens, before anyone reaches for the contract at all.
That belief is trust, and it cannot be drafted.
How trust gets built across a border
If trust is what matters, the practical question is how to build it when the usual foundations are absent. In my experience, it comes from a few unglamorous practices repeated consistently.
The first is doing what you said you would do on the small things, early and visibly.
Long before the large commitments come due, both sides are watching how the other handles minor obligations, timelines, and disclosures. Reliability on the small scale is the currency that buys credibility on the large scale.
People decide whether they can trust you with the important promises by watching how you treat the trivial ones.
The second is transparency about difficulty.
The instinct in a negotiation, especially across a cultural distance, is to present everything as smooth. But the counterparties who earned my deepest trust were the ones who told me plainly when something was hard, uncertain, or not going as planned.
Candor about problems is far more reassuring than confidence about everything, because it tells you that you will hear the truth when it counts.
The third is patience with understanding.
A great deal of cross-border friction comes from assuming that a word, a norm, or a gesture means the same thing on both sides when it does not.
The people who take the time to check their assumptions, to ask what something means rather than presuming, build trust faster than the ones who move quickly and leave a trail of small misunderstandings behind them.
Trust as infrastructure
Over time, I stopped thinking of trust as a soft accompaniment to a deal and started thinking of it as infrastructure, as real and as load-bearing as any legal structure.
In markets where the formal infrastructure is thin or unfamiliar, the relationship becomes the infrastructure. It is what allows capital to move across a distance that the paperwork alone could never bridge.
This is why the same banker can succeed in one country and struggle in another with identical terms. The terms travel. Trust has to be rebuilt in every new place, with every new counterpart.
There is a lesson in this that reaches beyond cross-border work.
Domestic finance leans so heavily on its shared context that it is easy to forget that the context is doing the work. Cross-border deals strip that away and reveal what was underneath all along.
Every financial relationship, near or far, ultimately rests on whether two parties believe each other. The border simply makes the truth impossible to ignore.
If I had to compress two decades into a single sentence for anyone entering this work, it would be this: negotiate the terms carefully, then spend most of your energy on the thing the terms cannot capture.
The deals I am proudest of were not the ones with the cleverest structures. They were the ones where, when the unexpected arrived, and it always did, both sides had already decided they could rely on each other.
That decision, made long before the crisis, is what held.
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