HSBC has announced Smart Checking, an AI-powered solution designed to transform and standardise the way trade finance documentation is processed, traced and checked at the bank. This marks a significant step forward in the digitalisation of documentary trade and reflects HSBC’s commitment to using technology to make trade finance more consistent and faster to process.
The solution combines HSBC’s proprietary AI with the expertise of its trade specialists to read, interpret and check trade documents at scale, enabling AI to handle high-volume, repetitive tasks while freeing experienced specialists to apply their judgement where it has the greatest impact.
For clients, faster document processing can help accelerate time to payment, providing greater certainty and enabling businesses to access liquidity and working capital sooner.
Smart Checking is built on HSBC’s extensive experience and scale in documentary trade, supported by its substantial repository of trade finance documentation and the knowledge of specialists around the world who were instrumental in shaping and testing the solution. They also helped define how exceptions should be presented, ensuring the workflow reflects real-world checking practices. Smart Checking is currently being used in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates, with plans for a full production roll out globally over time.
Thomas Elliott, Chief Operating Officer, Global Trade Solutions, HSBC, said: “Smart Checking is an ideal combination of AI and human expertise. AI handles the scale and complexity of documentary trade, while human judgement is essential to understanding exceptions and making the decisions that matter. By co-creating the solution with our trade experts, we are building technology that boosts efficiency, practicality and innovation.
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“Smart Checking is designed around compliance and policy requirements, with confidence-based workflows determining where automation is appropriate and where human review is required. With faster document handling, this can shorten the time to payment for our clients, which can improve certainty and help businesses unlock liquidity and working capital earlier.”
Documentary trade at HSBC involves a highly complex, document-intensive operation involving the processing of over a million documentary presentations each year, including documentary credits and collections. Each presentation can extend into hundreds of pages, with a large range of structured and unstructured data points requiring extraction for further review.
The complexity is further increased due to documentary credit checks often including additional conditions that are unique to each transaction and its underlying commercial contract. As a result, documents and checking requirements can vary significantly from one transaction to another. A single presentation can take hours to process, implying high operational demands, particularly during periods of peak activity.
Smart Checking has been designed to help address these challenges by using a combination of AI technologies and trade expertise to create a more streamlined checking process. AI is used to extract and classify information from documents, with advanced AI models turning complex and inconsistent documentation into structured data, helping information enter the process in an organised and searchable format.
An AI reasoning engine supported by a knowledge graph interprets the information and performs the documentary credit checks. This is designed to support a consistent approach to documentary trade checking, preserving the expertise and controls that are fundamental to trade finance, while providing a framework for explainable and auditable outcomes.