Mohamad M. Burjak
International Trade Finance · Documentary Credits · Demand Guarantees
Mohamad M. Burjak brings more than three decades of banking experience, combining deep specialist expertise in documentary credits, demand guarantees and international trade finance with many years of leadership in enterprise banking operations.
Specialist Trade Finance Experience
Mohamad M. Burjak’s trade finance experience was built through more than three decades of direct banking practice across several institutions: Arab Bank, Riyad Bank, Capital Bank of Jordan, Jordan Commercial Bank and, ultimately, Bank al Etihad.
It began with hands-on work in documentary export credits and progressively broadened across documentary credits, demand guarantees, standby letters of credit, documentary collections and the wider field of international trade operations. Over time, that experience extended well beyond transaction processing into policy and procedure design, operational risk and control, trade finance process redesign, operating and control architecture, and the introduction of electronic processing and banking technology into trade finance operations.
As his responsibilities developed, the work ceased to be only about handling a transaction or examining its documents. It increasingly required seeing the transaction as a whole: how the commercial deal was structured, how payment terms were framed, how the banking instrument was drafted, how documents would move, where controls were needed, where ambiguity or inconsistency might arise, and what could happen later if the transaction resulted in refusal, demand or dispute.
His experience also extended beyond banking to specialist advisory work for major regional companies involved in energy, electricity, industrial developments and large-scale projects. This included reviewing commercial contract terms and their relationship with payment and security arrangements, as well as drafting or reviewing documentary credits and demand guarantees associated with those projects. The objective was to achieve closer alignment between the underlying contractual obligation, the banking instrument and the way the project would actually be performed. In transactions of this scale, drafting precision is not merely technical: a relatively small disconnect between the contract and the credit or guarantee can have significant financial or operational consequences, or become the source of a dispute that could have been avoided at the structuring stage.
The greater value of this experience, however, lies not in the number of instruments, positions or sectors encountered, but in the professional judgement accumulated across them.
The distinctions that matter most are often found within the instrument itself. A provision that merely describes an event is not the same as one that creates a condition or obligation. Wording that appears almost interchangeable may produce materially different consequences for examination, demand or expiry. A document that appears commercially equivalent to another may alter the allocation of risk or a party’s ability to perform. Problems may originate in a subtle mismatch between the underlying contract and the banking instrument, in a document required in a form that cannot realistically be produced, in a timetable that does not fit the physical movement of the goods, or in an operating process designed for the normal case but not for what happens when the transaction departs from it.
The professional approach is therefore to understand each instrument on its own legal, banking and operational terms, and then place it back within the transaction as a whole. Who has undertaken what obligation? On what terms? What event creates, restricts or brings a right to an end? Where does risk move? Does the instrument actually reflect the commercial bargain? And what happens when performance does not follow the route originally anticipated?
This ability to connect rules, documents, contracts, operations and commercial reality is at the core of the specialist practice. It informs the approach to professional learning, transaction and policy review, dispute analysis, and work with banks, companies and legal practitioners who need to understand the substance of a trade finance issue before deciding how to address it.
Banking Operations Leadership
For more than seventeen years he served as Chief Operations Officer (COO) at Bank al Etihad. The role added an institutional dimension to his specialist background: responsibility for the bank's operating model, for its governance and control frameworks, and for the transformation and process-redesign programmes carried out across the bank. The breadth of that responsibility gave him a close view of how banking decisions are translated into execution through systems, procedures and people, and his specialist trade finance background continued to inform how he understood the design of operations, their controls and the way they are implemented within an institution.
Together, these perspectives provide a fuller view of how a transaction works in practice. Specialist experience clarifies what the instrument requires and where documentary risk arises; operations leadership shows how the resulting decision moves through governance, controls, systems and procedures into execution.
Independent Practice Today
Since mid-2026 he has worked independently with banks, companies and professionals on matters involving documentary credits, demand guarantees and related transactions. That work may arise before the principal terms and documentary obligations of a transaction are fixed, or after a documentary position has become contested. It includes reviewing transaction structures, payment terms and instrument wording; addressing questions of interpretation, presentation, payment and liability; and providing an independent opinion where a documentary position is unresolved or in dispute.
His experience in documentary disputes reaches back well before his independent practice. Over the years, he has provided specialist expertise in matters involving international financial institutions and major corporates. His role has included banking and documentary analysis, with some matters undertaken alongside legal counsel. That analysis addresses the instrument, the documents, the sequence of events and the relevant international banking practice; it is specialist banking and documentary analysis, not legal advice. His independent work also draws on a wider background in trade finance governance, policy and process design.
He has been a member of the ICC Banking Commission since 2001, was a member of the UCP 600 Consulting Group, and has been a member of the ICC Task Force on Guarantees since its establishment in 2003.
Professional Writing and Knowledge Development
His professional work has also included specialist courses in documentary credits and demand guarantees for practitioners in a number of Arab countries across Asia and Africa, including Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Kuwait and Libya. Professional writing has accompanied his work from its earlier stages. Since 2007, he has published specialist articles in DCInsight, a magazine published by the International Chamber of Commerce, addressing documentary credits, UCP 600, demand guarantees and trade finance practice in the Arab region. That line of writing continues today through Perspectives from Practice, where he addresses the questions that real transactions raise and that deserve careful attention.
Burjak Institute gives institutional form to this longer professional trajectory. Mohamad M. Burjak established it to turn accumulated experience into structured, well-documented professional knowledge in international trade finance, with particular attention to professional content in Arabic. It is therefore not simply an extension of the Founder's independent practice: its purpose is to develop, document and publish specialist professional knowledge on an institutional basis, drawing on the experience that shaped its beginnings without remaining dependent on individual practice.