Standard Chartered has teamed up with IBM to launch an "augmented intelligence' engine for trade document processing.
Traditional documentary trade requires millions of data elements in paper-based, unstructured documents - often issued by various companies - to be reviewed through a largely manual process.
The new IBM-powered engine helps automate much of this by converting non-digital shipping documents into machine-readable format, identifying and classifying document types from a pre-defined database, and using natural language processing to read and capture context from data.
Standard Chartered has rolled the engine out in markets across Asia, Africa and the Middle East and says it has helped improve efficiency and accuracy, providing a better trade processing experience for clients.
Lisa Robins, global head, transaction banking, Standard Chartered, says: "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."