One of the world's largest fintechs, Finastra, has announced that pan-African financial group, Bank of Africa, has selected its Conpend's Trade AI app from its open innovation platform, FusionFabric.cloud.

By extending the functionality of Finastra's Fusion Trade Innovation technology, the app enables users to reduce document and compliance checking time by automating the examination of documents under a letter of credit (L/C).

Time and risk reduction

The app digitises trade finance processes using optical character recognition, natural language processing and progressive machine learning to reduce the risk and cost of trade finance operations.

Head of trade finance operations at Bank of Africa, Leila Bahoum, says she expects that by digitising paper-based processes, the solution will reduce processing time by 30 per cent and trade finance risk levels by up to 80 per cent.

How it works

Conpend Trade AI extracts unstructured data from scanned paper documents and can also process already digitised data.

The data is then screened and analysed using rules and advanced analytics, to enable users to make informed business decisions quickly and accurately.

Money laundering screening

The app is fully compliant with all major global regulations according to Finastra and automatically performs all necessary compliance checks for a trade transaction.

This includes money laundering screening and handling alerts during the screening process, which dramatically reduces false positives and time spent on decision-making.

Goods in transit

The solution also enables vessel checking and voyage tracking to support goods in transit.

Separately, Finastra is contemplating including L/Cs in a joint strategic initiative with the International Chamber of Commerce to tackle the growing trade finance gap (DC World News, 31 March 2021).

This article represents the views of the author and not necessarily those of the ICC or Coastline Solutions.