Commerzbank has partnered with fintech Conpend to automate selected compliance relevant pre-checks in trade finance transaction processing by 2020, and has partnered with fintech Conpend. Automation is expected to reduce transaction processing times while improving risk controls and interaction with clients.
The bank’s head of product management in the Trade Services unit, Enno-Burghard Weitzel, said in a statement: “The processing of trade finance transactions is becoming more complex and prone to higher risks, as manual processes struggle to keep pace with the increasing regulatory and market trends…Our aim is to focus the expertise of our trade finance specialists to the crucial and complex parts of the business, while using artificial intelligence to improve efficiency and further optimize risk controls.”
The plan is to automate around 80% of the selected compliance relevant checks of the bank’s trade finance processes by 2020. In October 2018, Commerzbank has started a pilot phase to automate the anti-money laundering processes. After an evaluation of the pilot phase, there will be a further stage of the sanctions checks in trade finance during 2019.
The fintech company partner Conpend focuses on trade finance operations and uses optical character recognition and progressive machine learning to extract data from physical documents, recognize patterns and flag deviations. The machine learning component means that the software will constantly improve the identification of potentially non-compliant transactions as it is being used. It will use APIs to connect to Commerzbank’s existing trade finance processing infrastructure and create a complete and detailed audit trail for the bank to front-run the increasing expectations of regulators with respect to reporting requirements.