Standard Chartered teams with IBM to launch streamlined trade processing platform
The world's big banks' rush toward digital services continues unabated as Standard Chartered has announced the launch of the Trade AI Engine.
It is a joint product developed in partnership with IBM to enhance the client experience in trade document processing through increased operational efficiency and strengthened operational control. The platform is currently live in key markets across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, with more markets in the USA and Asia Pacific to follow.
Traditional documentary trade requires millions of data elements in paper-based, unstructured documents – often issued by various companies – to be reviewed by what is a largely manual process. The Trade AI Engine automates this process via the conversion of non-digital shipping documents into a machine-readable format that's enabled by Optical Character Recognition (OCR); identification and classification of document types from an initial pre-defined database; continuous Machine learning (ML) based on user re-classification / re-defining of data elements to further improve accuracy; Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to read and capture context from data in the documents.
As a result, banks can cope with high volumes of diverse back office tasks with greater efficiency and accuracy, thus offering a more streamlined trading process for clients. “As a market leader and major intermediary between buyers and sellers in the centre of global trade, we process more than 36 million pages of trade documents annually, with over 200 million data elements for name capture and processing,” said Lisa Robins, Global Head, Transaction Banking at Standard Chartered. “The Trade AI Engine significantly reduces the amount of time and effort in this review process while raising the bar on our controls environment, further enhancing our ability to play the connector role for our clients by facilitating transactions at pace with the growth of their businesses.”
Likhit Wagle, VP, Financial Services Sector, IBM Asia Pacific adds, “Trade document processing traditionally relies on a high degree of manual effort to ensure transaction compliance. IBM worked with Standard Chartered Bank to develop a solution that would automate the retrieval of key information from text within scanned documents."
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