Standard Chartered (SC) has introduced Trade AI Engine, an augmented intelligence (AI) engine, developed jointly with IBM, aimed at driving transformation in the traditional trade documentary system.
Image: Standard Chartered partners with IBM to develop Trade AI Engine. Photo: courtesy of Standard Chartered.
By increased efficiency in operations and strengthened operational control, Trade AI Engine is expected to improve the client experience in trade document processing, said the banking giant.
Currently, the solution is live in key markets in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, with plans to launch it in more markets where Standard Chartered has a presence.
According to the banking major, traditional documentary trade needs millions of data elements in paper-based, unstructured documents, which are issued often by various firms. It takes a largely manual process to review the documents, which by implementing Trade AI Engine gets automated to a significant extent.
Standard Chartered transaction banking global head Lisa Robins said: “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.
“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.”
The solution helps in converting non-digital shipping documents into machine-readable format through optical character recognition (OCR), and identifies and classifies document types from an initial pre-defined database.
Trade AI Engine also uses continuous machine learning (ML) based on user re-classification or re-defining of data elements to further enhance accuracy. The AI engine’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities enable reading and capturing context from data contained in the trade documents.
Standard Chartered said that the trade document solution helps it to manage vast volumes of diverse back office tasks with greater efficiency and accuracy, thereby providing a more seamless experience for clients in trade processing.
IBM Asia Pacific financial services sector VP Likhit Wagle said: “The Trade AI Engine enables multi-format document capture without templates and uses NLP to extract relevant information for review, as well as leveraging user interaction to improve text extraction accuracy and streamline the process with each cycle in real-time.”