Getting to know Mr Robert (Bob) Ronai
Bob’s background in exporting and importing stretches over more than 50 years, initially in international banking then in the world of international commerce.
In 1989 he started his own business as an independent consultant and educator assisting exporters and importers in the “back office” side of their businesses. In all, he has directly controlled and co-ordinated many tens of thousands of shipments of a very wide variety of products coming and going all round the world.
Bob now has the honour of being the first Australian and only the second non-lawyer to be invited by the ICC to be a member of their Incoterms® Drafting Group to draft the new Incoterms® 2020. This was as a result of his being a member of the ICC’s committee which drafted their publication “ICC Guide to Transport and the Incoterms® 2010 Rules” as well as being a prolific poster of comments on LinkedIn regarding these rules. He was previously a member of ICC Australia’s Incoterms® Committee contributing to the drafting of Incoterms® 2010 and was then Australia’s representative to the three days of Incoterms® 2010 Release Conference and Masterclass workshop in Paris October 2010. In May 2015 he gave a presentation on Incoterms® 2010 to the ICC’s first-ever conference in Yangon, Myanmar, and in October 2015 was invited to give a similar presentation to ICC Hong Kong.
Since September 2019 after the release of Incoterms® 2020 he has presented workshops around Australia and for ICC national committees in Colombia, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Qatar, UAE and Austria plus corporate in-house workshops.
Bob holds the Diploma in Export Management (1977) from the Australian Institute of Export (NSW) and is a Certified Documentary Credit Specialist (CDCS) by The London Institute of Banking and Finance. He is a member of the Australian Institute of Export and International Chamber of Commerce (Australia).
He is an active member of the International Chamber of Commerce (Australia)’s Banking Technique & Practices Committee. Bob was one of two delegates from ICC Australia to the ICC Banking Commission conferences in Beijing in October 2011, Lisbon April 2013, Vienna October 2013, Dubai April 2014, Singapore April 2015 and Jakarta April 2017.
Bob was the first Australian to attend ICC Austria’s annual Trade Finance Week conference in Vienna in June 2013 which attracted some 200 bankers mainly from Europe, and was asked to give two presentations and be a panellist at the 2014 conference. ICC Czech Republic asked him to then follow this up with a conference in Prague. He was again invited to the 2015, 2017 and 2018 Vienna conferences, couldn’t accept for the 2019 conference but plans to be there in 2020.
Bob is the author of a number of articles on exporting and importing which have appeared over the years in a wide range of Australian publications and most recently several times in the International Chamber of Commerce’s Trade Finance magazine DC Insight and the International Institute of Banking & Law Practices publication DCW Documentary Credit World. He is the manager of two large groups on LinkedIn -- “Trade Finance” (over 35,000 members) and” Incoterms” (over 19,500 members)
www.exports.com.au
