The development of international trade relations and the need of the merchants to benefit from financial means that correspond to the necessity of fastness of commercial relations have led to the development of new and complex techniques for financing the international trade.
Thus, new and complex contracts have emerged as means of financing the international trade (the factoring and the forfeiting). These contracts do not request real or personal securities in order to guarantee the credit agreed by the parties. Within the international trade, these new financing techniques represent one of the most relevant examples of the way in which the practice of international relations has adapted some classical institutions of civil law to the new realities of the contemporary business life, creating complex operations meant to satisfy the interests of all participants. The assignment of debts constitutes an example of such operation.
The present paper analyses these financing techniques in the perspective of existing uniform rules (such as Ottawa Convention on international factoring contract 1988 and The United Nations New York Convention on the assignment of receivables in international trade 2001), as well as in the perspective of legal provisions of Romanian law (the Law no. 469/2002). The national legal rules contain some inconsistencies when defining the two contracts the factoring and the forfeiting because in the light of Romanian legislation they are based on the transfer of debts resulting from commercial activity through the assignment of receivables.