HSBC Bank announced the launch of the Smart Checking tool, which relies on artificial intelligence (AI) and is aimed at improving operations in the field of trade finance. The company announced this on September 28. The tool is designed to "transform and standardize" the processing, tracking, and verification of documentation in the area of trade finance. HSBC processes over a million documentary presentations annually, including documentary credits and collections. Each presentation can contain hundreds of pages with various structured and unstructured data that require extraction for further review.
The complexity increases because the checks of documentary credits often require additional conditions unique to each transaction and the corresponding commercial contract. This means that documents and the requirements for their verification can vary greatly from one transaction to another. Processing such documents can take hours, creating high operational loads, especially during peak periods. Smart Checking was developed to address these challenges by combining AI technologies and trade expertise for more streamlined verification. Artificial intelligence extracts and classifies information from documents, transforming complex and disorganized documentation into structured data, allowing information to be entered into the process in an organized and searchable format.
For clients, faster document processing can speed up the time to payment, providing greater confidence and enabling businesses to access liquidity and working capital faster. “Smart Checking – is the perfect combination of AI and human expertise. AI handles the scale and complexity of documentary trade, while human judgment is necessary to understand exceptions and make important decisions,” noted Thomas Elliot, HSBC's Chief Operating Officer for Global Trade Solutions. Smart Checking is already being used in the UK, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates, with plans for global deployment in the future.
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