Every answer and its explanation appears here once you have finished the path. Each one then links to the matching glossary entry, where the concept is set out in full with its worked example.
1. An exporter is refused capacity on a country. It responds by documenting its buyer's strength and the length of the relationship. What should be said?
It is arguing the only points not at issue: a good deal consumes as much capacity as a mediocre one for the same amount
Capacity is what runs short, with trust not in question, and a country limit is consumed in commitments and not in claims: it is saturated by deals unrelated to the one presented and never heard of. Understanding that changes the conversation, because one stops pleading and starts looking for what in the structure of the transaction costs capacity for nothing. The answer calling the approach useless but costless misses the real cost, which is time lost starting from scratch at every call. And changing buyer unblocks nothing, since it is the country and not the debtor that is saturated.
Glossary entry →2. Which parameter does the exporter actually control to free up capacity, and why that one?
Tenor: a limit is consumed as amount multiplied by duration, and shortening, splitting or advancing an installment frees what risk quality does not
A nine million commitment over two years ties up capacity for two years, the same amount over one hundred and eighty days frees it twice a year, and many portfolios carry tenor sub-limits precisely because long is what saturates. Tenor is a parameter the exporter sets and the underwriter cannot change on its behalf, which is half the answer. The cover rate is the most serious false trail: it does reduce the commitment, marginally, and it does not change the tenor, which is the dominant factor. Price does not buy scarce capacity, and spreading over several buyers in the same country consumes exactly the same country limit.
Glossary entry →3. The country limit is saturated. What question earns a place in the queue?
In which month capacity frees up: an exposure amortizes, and the underwriter knows within a few weeks when there will be room
A queue on a saturated country leaves the door open: it runs on an unpublished calendar one can ask for, and asking for it rather than re-asking the same thing in a loop is what separates an exporter that gets a place from one that starts over. Knowing the missing amount is useful and comes later: it serves to split, once one knows when. Asking who occupies the aggregate is the question that never gets an answer, an aggregate being shared with insureds one does not see. And the annual review has the wrong time step, capacity freeing up as exposures amortize.
Glossary entry →4. An exporter asked for a wide limit out of prudence and uses only a fraction of it. What is the risk?
Having it cut in a review of dormant commitments, at the precise moment it was about to be used
An approved but unused limit ties up capacity that will be missing for someone else, and often for oneself when the next deal arrives: saturated portfolios get reviewed and dormant commitments cut. Asking for the capacity one will use, when one will use it, is portfolio behavior and not modesty, and it is that wording that tips the answer. Believing an unused limit is free is the natural intuition and exactly what the module corrects. The premium and rating answers invent sanctions that are plausible elsewhere, neither of which describes the real mechanism, which is a reallocation of capacity.
Glossary entry →5. The limit is genuinely closed. What are the ways out, and which one does not work?
Look elsewhere, go to the public window if eligible, change the transaction itself; and waiting in silence does not work
The three ways out are co-insurance or an excess layer in another market, which means accepting that loss definitions differ from one contract to another, the public window where the transaction is eligible, which brings back the tenor and local content boundaries, and changing the transaction itself through a shorter tenor or a split amount. What does not work is waiting in silence, because a queue you do not chase reforms without you. The answer that drops the deal is the costliest and the most common: it treats a capacity refusal as information about the buyer, which it is not, and abandons sound business. Shifting the exposure onto a third party's policy presupposes an insurable interest that third party does not have.
Glossary entry →