Danske Bank rolls out Conpend’s TRADE AI app for trade finance

Danske Bank, Denmark’s largest bank, has announced it is working with Conpend, a specialist provider of document checking software for trade finance processes.

Conpend founder Marc Smith

Danske Bank will leverage Conpend’s TRADE AI app. Paper-based documents, as well as digital documentation, will be scanned and entered into the application, which “reads” the contents and checks them against a set of pre-defined rules.

The artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities automatically check against anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC) and sanctions regulations.

“Our partnership is allowing Danske Bank to take a huge stride towards creating a digital environment around a business area that is characterised by physical documents and other manual processes,” comments Erik Punt, product owner of the trade finance portfolio at Danske Bank.

Roll-out will be a multi-step process, with Danske Bank gradually introducing the TRADE AI solution to all relevant staff, including trade finance advisors, compliance and other stakeholders.

Punt compliments Conpend’s work ethic, saying that the vendor has “willingly and actively” worked with Danske Bank to tailor TRADE AI to the bank’s specific business requirements.

“We expect to see significant efficiency gains after initial investment into teaching the system to capture and qualify data,” he adds.

Marc Smith, founder and director at Conpend, says “the transformative potential” of the TRADE AI app will help Danske Bank and its clients “achieve unparalleled operational trade finance efficiencies”.

Conpend was founded in 2016 and is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Among its clients is Germany’s Commerzbank, which in 2018 embarked on a project to automate 80% of the selected compliance relevant pre-checks in trade finance transaction processing.