BANK OF AFRICA taps Conpend TRADE AI app, via Finastra, to digitize trade finance

By Pavithra R

Finastra, building an open platform that accelerates collaboration and innovation in financial services has announced that the BANK OF AFRICA, a pan-African financial group, has selected Conpend’s TRADE AI app from its open innovation platform, FusionFabric.cloud.

The app extends the functionality of Finastra’s Fusion Trade Innovation technology and enables users to reduce document and compliance checking time by automating the examination of documents under a Letter of Credit. It digitizes trade finance processes by leveraging optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP) and progressive machine learning to reduce the risk and cost of trade finance operations.

“The solution will improve our trade finance operations by speeding up the approval of trade finance documents. We expect it will digitize manual, paper-based processes, reduce processing time by 30 per cent, and reduce trade finance risk levels by up to 80 per cent. Having access to third-party apps was a clear differentiator when looking at trade finance solutions,” said Leila Bahoum, Board member in charge of Trade Finance Operations from OGS Subsidiary of BANK OF AFRICA.

Conpend TRADE AI extracts unstructured data from scanned paper documents. It can also process already digitized data. The data is then screened and analyzed, using rules and advanced analytics, to empower business users to make informed business decisions. . It is fully compliant with all major global regulations and performs all necessary compliance checks for a trade transaction automatically. This includes money laundering screening and handling alerts during the screening process, thereby reducing false positives and time spent on decision-making. The solution also enables vessel checking and voyage tracking to support goods in transit.

“We’re so pleased that BANK OF AFRICA has chosen to plug our innovative technology into its systems. This is one of the big benefits of us making our app available on Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud. We’ve been able to build our solution out quickly on the platform and make it available to banks around the world in support of Finastra’s vision of openness and collaboration,” said Marc Smith, Founder and Director, Conpend.

This is another great example of banks and fintechs collaborating to bring innovative technology to market fast. We are confident BANK OF AFRICA will realize great results with the Conpend Trade AI app and look forward to other banks tapping into this opportunity to further enhance the functionality of our Fusion Trade Innovation,” said Anastasia McAlpine, Principal Product Manager, Trade and Supply Chain Finance at Finastra.