Cross-Border Institute gets $500K Scotiabank grant for trade research
Recognizing the important research being conducted by a University of Windsor organization dedicated to studying the Canada-U.S. border, one of the nation’s big banks on Thursday announced a major financial contribution towards its work. Scotiabank’s half-million-dollar donation to the Cross-Border Institute will fund a new initiative focused on research to help Canadian enterprises better participate in the global marketplace. Emerging technologies, political and policy impacts on global business, supply chain finance and the international policy environment were just a few of the topics the institute plans to investigate over the next five years under the Scotiabank Global Financial Transactions Initiative.
“It gives us the opportunity to get a lot of really smart people to focus on this topic that maybe not too many people have focused on,” said Bill Anderson, director of the institute whose members in a variety of disciplines and levels of expertise participate in research, education and public outreach related to the movement of goods and services across the border. Anderson said the initial focus will be on investigating how banks and other service providers can help clients transition to new technology.
At the same time, researchers will look at goods movement and trade regulation, speeding up global transactions and protecting the integrity of financial trade data.
“Trade and international trade (has been) at the core of Scotiabank now for more than a century,” said Alex Besharat, the financial institution’s senior vice-president and head of Canadian wealth management. “It’s natural for us to support this endeavour, to do research that is real and that brings real value to the economies of the places we work, and also to develop students to be future leaders in this field and in banking and finance.” Students from multiple disciplines will be involved in the Scotiabank-funded research, Anderson said, adding most of the people in the Cross-Border Institute’s on-campus building are students of some kind, be they at the undergraduate or postgraduate level. “A big part of this is to try to develop methods, materials, to be able to teach this stuff in a way that’s more engaging, more interesting and more informative,” Anderson said. He said a lot of people find aspects of cross-border studies boring, but that identifying uninteresting, everyday things, like a single truck having a minor issue at a border crossing, can be crucial to making the whole system work better.
“Trade is the lifeline of Canada,” Besharat added. “So much of the artery of that trade is right here in Windsor — trade is part of the core fabric of this city.”