HSBC And IBM Develop Cognitive Intelligence Solution To Digitise Global Trade

Trade finance giants HSBC is working with IBM to develop a cognitive intelligence solution combining optical character recognition with advanced robotics to make global trade safer and more efficient for thousands of businesses. HSBC's Global Trade and Receivables Finance (GTRF) team facilitates over $500bn of documentary trade for customers every year, and in doing so must manually review and process up to 100m pages of documents, ranging from invoices to packing lists and insurance certificates. Newsweek is hosting an AI and Data Science in Capital Markets conference on December 6-7 in New York. The new solution uses IBM's analytics technology, including intelligent segmentation and text analytics, to identify, digitise and extract key data within these documents before feeding it into the bank's transaction processing systems; boosting accuracy whilst freeing up staff for more value-adding activities, said a statement. Natalie Blyth, HSBC's Global Head of GTRF, said: "The average trade transaction requires 65 data fields to be extracted from 15 different documents, with 40 pages to be reviewed. By digitising this process we will make transactions quicker and safer for both buyers and suppliers, leading our industry forwards, and we will reduce compliance risks through an enhanced ability to manage huge volumes of data."