HSBC has tapped business technology major IBM to develop a cognitive intelligence solution to make trade more efficient for businesses.
The new cognitive 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.
HSBC’s Global Trade and Receivables Finance (GTRF) facilitates over $500 billion of documentary trade for customers every year and manually reviews and processes up to 100 million pages of documents.
“The average trade transaction requires 65 data fields to be extracted from 15 different documents, with 40 pages to be reviewed,” said Natalie Blyth, HSBC’s Global Head of GTRF. “By digitising this process we will make transactions quicker and safer for both buyers and suppliers.”
“The problem is how to capture semi-structured documents with highly variant content through an analogue process, and no-one has the perfect answer,” said Roger Welch, Industry (Financial) Expert and Solution Architect for IBM Analytics ECM practice.
HSBC is using the technology to analyse English-language import and export bills in several markets in Asia, Europe, the Americas and the MENA region. The team aims to enhance the solution so it can read a wider range of documents and languages including French, Spanish and Chinese.
