Trade finance often still involves paper documents moving between banks, shippers, and exporters, and JPMorgan just gave a vote of confidence to Cleareye.ai to disrupt that archaic process.  

JPMorgan’s Trade and Working Capital group has made a strategic investment in Cleareye.ai, a startup that it started working with last year to digitize and automate trade finance, which has largely been stuck in the past.  

Through a combination of computer vision and natural-language processing, Cleareye.ai automatically ingests documents and then analyzes them to catch compliance and sanction violations or money laundering red flags.  

Instead of manually poring over documents, trade operations analysts can now skim Cleareye.ai’s reports, which drastically reduces processing times, human error, and risk. JPMorgan previously said the tool could “massively improve efficiency” for its commercial trade processing tool. 

Cleareye.ai and JPMorgan aren’t the only ones gunning to transform trade finance, though: Santander’s corporate and investment banking arm just made its own strategic equity investment in Komgo, which also aims to increase the efficiency, transparency, and security of trade finance.