108 Similarly, Intellect Design’s iGTB Copilot, also powered by Azure OpenAI Service, enables bank customers to self-serve by answering natural language enquiries with AI. “iGTB Copilot can discern insights from payments,” says Hazou. “It can also find out which counterparties are paying customers late and from which locations. Currently, organisations do this by viewing a bank statement through a Swift message type called an MT 940 and correlating it manually. But with natural language processing, simple enquiries can be resolved quickly and easily. It’s about empowering clients so they can self-serve and that’s a result of the whole modernisation of this interface between clients and their banks.” As such, digital transformation strategies such as getting data in order provide value for financial services customers who are looking for insights about their own business and how they are performing in comparison to their peers. “Data can offer insights into a client’s business operations, such as forecasting cash flow based on historical transactions,” says Hazou. “It can also pull value from environmental, social and governance, weather and economic data like movement, exchange and interest rates. There’s a broad set of data that can affect, for example, financial forecasting and help companies better predict their positions and what their needs are.” The power of data in trade finance Technologies that help businesses capture and analyse their data can also help to automate traditional back-office processes, such as those in trade finance operations. “The work that Microsoft is doing in trade finance focuses on data,” says Hazou. “In the current environment, trade finance documentation is processed manually. There are said to be four billion pieces of paper in circulation for trade finance every year. This is because it follows an old business model that dates back to the House of Medici, an Italian banking family in the 15th century. A lot of the documents – such as bills of lading and exchange, invoices and certificates of inspections – have been mandated to be in paper form due to pre-existing legislation.” In 2022, the International Chamber of Commerce estimated that digitising trade documents could generate $25 billion in new economic growth by 2024, and the industry is already making significant changes to digitise and automate bank processing, paving the way for increased efficiency globally. “There have been changes to the regulations for trade paper,” says Hazou. “The UK passed a new act called the Electronic Trade Documentation Act in 2023, replacing the former law, which was set in 1882 and required wet signatures, meaning that trade documentation had to be on paper. It is currently being adopted in other European countries and in the USA.” The new law enables organisations to digitise processes. “For example, a letter of credit is traditionally printed out on paper, signed, “ There are said to be four billion pieces of paper in circulation for trade finance every year.“ FEATURE Financial services firms must have systems that facilitate a quick response to supply chain disruptions, like the Baltimore bridge collapse of March 2024 Photo: iStock/James Radja
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