Commercial Lending vs International Trade Finance

I work at a commercial bank, and I'm currently a senior analyst for our middle market team. I'm on the path to be a commercial lender, and I will be moved into a lender role as soon as a job opens up in one of the groups that I support (no firm timeline for this).

I was recently approached with an interesting internal opportunity. Our international trade finance group (mostly deals with imports/exports) is looking to bring on a junior banker to develop with succession planning in mind (evidently most of the group is about the same distance from retirement). I think it could be very interesting, and that there will be a lot of built in advancement as I gain experience and people start to retire. However, I have some concerns about what happens in the second half of my career.

The international trade finance group is a very small group (around ten people across the entire country), and while it very common for our senior leaders to have taken jobs in these types of groups at some point in their career, they have almost all started out in a middle market group as a lender for 3-5 years before they start working in the ancillary business lines. I'm concerned that if I don't have that general middle market experience that it will ultimately be held against me down the line. You can never predict the future, but it seems like our formula for success is to start in middle market and then work in as many other lines of business as you get the opportunity to. However, as I said before, there seems to be a lot of built in advancement to this group (around 30% of the department are SVP level bankers in the same role I would be taking), and there would not be much competition for the EVP level department head position when the current leaders/senior bankers decide to retire.

I would appreciate any feedback you guys have. Do you think that I should stay the course and wait for a middle market job to open up? If I take the international finance job what do my exit ops look like? It seems like a decent niche to develop some expertise, but I don't feel like there are that many jobs out there for that kind of work. Outside of exit ops to other industries, do you think that other banks would value that experience when it comes to hiring for more senior roles?