Citi has announced a new initiative aimed at boosting the efficiency and performance of trade transactions with artificial intelligence (AI).
A press release this week said Citi is collaborating with EY and SAS on its NextGen project, which will include the development of a risk analytics scoring engine that uses AI to address friction in reviewing global trade transactions. Their partnership will focus on promoting regulatory compliance and digitization of cross-border trade, with the NextGen solution providing analysis of trade transactions, natural language processing to assess unstructured data and customer activity and process automation that aligns bank resources and policies.
"By leveraging innovation, we continue our strategic journey to drive digitization throughout our worldwide operations," said Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions Global Head of Trade John Ahearn in a statement. "We process 9 million transactions annually, and the NextGen project will help us optimize our processes from the back office to the front, by expanding the use of digitization, automation and advanced analytics."
The financial institution currently digitizes 25 million trade-related documents a year using optical character recognition. NextGen aims to accelerate this initiative to further automate manual processes in the trade space.
The initiative will deploy the risk and technology consulting expertise offered by EY, as well as the analytics platform developed by SAS, to combat reliance on manual processes and risk mitigation.
"This real-time solution will help us to be able to more efficiently detect transactions with potential compliance concerns up front," added Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions Global Head of Trade Services Valeria Sica in another statement. "This solution assists in managing and comparing a large number of data points across current and prior transactions, which will provide more context and usable data to aid the decision maker in reviewing global trade transactions, which has traditionally been a very manual process across the industry."
