Delivering exceptional customer experiences by accelerating deal transactions

Automate a highly variable document process involving multiple global stakeholders  

The trade finance team at a Top 5 Global Bank was looking to enable faster and more accurate completion of deals by processing huge volumes of data for commercial clients. The process is extremely document heavy including instructions for a Letter of Credit received as a SWIFT MT700 message, coupled with accompanying documents such as Bill of Lading, Bill of Exchange and Commercial Invoices that all need to be classified and reviewed. Data from these documents must be captured and inputted into the bank’s systems and infrastructure and simultaneously details from the documents must be validated and utilized to make decisions. Trade documents are sent all over the world between multiple parties, typically resulting in delays, discrepancies and numerous inquiries between the various parties involved. 

The team wanted to automate the processing of thousands of letters received via email as word or PDF each month. In this manual process, various discrepancies would arise as documents were exchanged between multiple parties and new data was inputted throughout the process. Resolving a single inquiry could take up to three days and cause significant bottlenecks in the overall approval process – often taking up to a month to complete. The complexity of this process was further compounded by a huge variety of highly-variable and natural language text which made the process difficult to be automated or replicated by multiple teams given the complexity of messages. 

Increasing efficiency by saving analysts time 

In selecting a solution for this bank needed a platform that could process highly variable, unstructured data and convert it to a checklist that analysts could use. Accuracy of the data digitized was critical to the success of the process given the variety of formats and poor image quality that was often submitted. 

They chose Instabase to  process data inside the documents with unmatched extraction quality despite the poor quality of images. Instabase’s table extraction and  structural detection enabled the bank to quickly digitize complex data included in the SWIFT messages. Leveraging the Instabase platform, a checklist was generated for the analysts to pass the information to the other stakeholders to facilitate quick deal transactions.

With up to 90% accuracy in processing the information, a large number of the transactions can be processed straight through without requiring any manual checks. For high worth clients, previously hundreds of fields needed to be reviewed, and now an “eyeball check” was select fields was all that was necessary, reducing the processing time from 3 hours to less than 30 minutes. With this increased efficiency, the trade finance team could spend more time serving customers, resolving complex resolutions, and building trust for future transactions. 

Looking forward to the partnership 

With this critical process now automated, the bank is now envisioning a future self-service state for customers which would transform their experience and time to value for this critical process. In partnership with Instabase, the bank is exploring how to extend the capabilities of Instabase to enable customers to self-service and submit documents via the web portal or a mobile application. 

In the next phase of this journey, the trade finance team would be able to share the document checklist directly with customers who could upload the information requested through the web portal or mobile app. Instabase’s powerful workflow capability would: 

With this massive transformation complete, the bank now has the opportunity to evaluate other use cases which can further operational improvements such as document verification, language translation, and trade guarantee to transform the customer journey.