Commerzbank of Germany says it is working with financial technology company Conpend to automate around 80 per cent of compliance procedures in its trade finance operations by 2020.

The bank has started with a pilot phase to automate its anti-money laundering (AML) compliance processes.

Conpend partnership

The automated solutions aim to reduce transaction processing times while improving risk controls and interactions with clients.

After an evaluation of the AML pilot phase, Commerzbank expects to introduce automated sanctions checks in its trade finance operations during 2019.

Artificial intelligence

Conpend is a financial technology company focused on trade finance solutions.

The company claims it is unique in offering optical character recognition and progressive machine learning to extract data from physical documents, recognise patterns and flag up deviations.

The machine learning component means that the software will constantly improve its own ability to identify potentially non-compliant transactions as it is being used Conpend claims.