Standard Chartered has announced the official launch of the Trade AI Engine, an ‘augmented intelligence’ engine developed jointly in partnership with IBM which aims to enhance clients’ experience in trade document processing through increased operational efficiency and strengthened operational control.

The solution is initially live in key markets across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, with more of the bank’s markets to follow.

The Trade AI Engine enables non-digital shipping documents to be converted into machine-readable format enabled by optical character Recognition (OCR). In addition, it identifies and classifies document types from an initial pre-defined database.

Other functionalities of the new solution include continuous machine learning (ML) based on user re-classification/re-defining of data elements to further improve accuracy, as well as natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to read and capture context from data in the documents.

Digital initiatives

Standard Chartered says that the innovative solution allows the bank to handle high volumes of diverse back office tasks with greater efficiency and accuracy, offering a more seamless trade processing experience for clients.

Lisa Robins, Standard Chartered’s global head, transaction banking adds: “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.”

Robins says that Standard Chartered currently processes more than 36 million pages of trade documents annually, with over 200 million data elements for name capture and processing.

Likhit Wagle, vice president, financial services sector, IBM Asia Pacific commented: “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.”

The launch is the latest in a series of digital transformation innovations by Standard Chartered. Last August it announced a collaboration with Siemens Financial Services, the financing arm of Siemens and digital trade provider Trade IX to carry out an industry-first client pilot to create an end-to-end blockchain-based smart guarantees proposition in trade finance.

Last month, the bank announced the launch of an expanded coverage of Straight2Bank Pay, a digital collections gateway for corporate clients, to additional markets in Asia, as well as the Straight2Bank Pay mobile app in Singapore.

This year has also seen the introduction of SC Ventures Fintech Bridge, a platform to  connect and match partners from the fintech ecosystem to Standard Chartered’s internal community, where they can propose solutions to challenges posted by the bank’s business units or request investments. Investors can also use the portal to recommend start-ups to the bank for future collaborations.