Instabase - which spent two months at Standard Chartered's eXellerator innovation lab - uses programme synthesis, natural language processing, optical character recognition, and machine learning capabilities to identify and extract data from multiple sources and various unstructured forms, and turns them into meaningful and structured data points.

The technology will help Standard Chartered continue its move away from manual processes for corporate and institutional client onboarding, using machine language to automate client due diligence for business criteria such as the sourcing of information from various external public and private registries on sanctions and adverse media mentions matched against various watch lists.

Meanwhile, Instabase is also helping to speed up SME lending, as bank statements provided by clients can be processed and financial calculations can be performed automatically, saving hundreds of hours a week.

The client onboarding system is already live in Singapore, India, and the UK, and will soon be launched in other markets in Europe and the UAE. The lending tech has been rolled out in Bangladesh and is set to arrive in Singapore.

The partners are also working on other use cases in areas such as retail onboarding, CIB legal documents reconciliation, corporate loan processing, trade shift messages, and loan syndicate workflow automation.

Michael Gorriz, group CIO, Standard Chartered, says: "We first met Instabase in Silicon Valley and saw tremendous potential in how their sophisticated ML and Natural Language Processing capabilities could automate highly manual operations across the bank, from client due diligence, to Retail Bank statements, to vendor invoice processing.

"We worked on several proof of concepts and within months, we are ‘live’ in a few of our key markets and looking to roll it out in more markets and new applications."