JPMorgan Invests in Trade Finance Firm Cleareye.AI

Trade finance provider Cleareye.ai has received a strategic investment from J.P. Morgan.

The companies announced the investment — no dollar amount was provided — Tuesday (June 20), saying that Cleareye would offer trade finance solutions for the banking giant and its clients around the world.

“Future proofing trade operations has been at the forefront of J.P. Morgan’s digital strategy in trade and working capital,” James Fraser, who oversees trade and working capital for the bank, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.

“A manually intensive industry loaded with paper and lacking standardization, burdened by an increasing cost base, needs real innovation in order to transform.”

According to the release, Cleareye’s ClearTrade platform automates those manually-intensive tasks using a document digitization engine that can extract, validate, and accurately classify unstructured data.

The tool can also help companies interpret trade data and documents to spot red flags tied to trade-based money laundering (TBML) and sanctions.

Beyond the investment, Cleareye will continue working with J.P. Morgan’s trade and working capital department. The two companies first joined forces last September.

“Digitizing trade finance documentation has the ability to provide real benefits to J.P. Morgan and our clients,” J.P. Morgan’s Stuart Roberts said at the time. “Banks have grappled to solve the puzzle of paper and manual data entry in this business for many years and our alliance with Cleareye is taking meaningful steps towards solving the problem.”

As PYMNTS reported earlier this year, recent months have shown a number of companies focused on ways to tackle the trade finance gap as lenders tighten their standards.

For example, Santander in January unveiled a B2B buy now, pay later (BNPL) product for multinational corporations. Created in partnership with Allianz Trade and Oslo-based BNPL FinTech Two, the tool lets companies offer their business clients a consumer-style BNPL option with near-instant approval.

Meanwhile, trade credit insurance, as provided by Hyperion X’s Tepfin X platform, gives banks and their brokers the ability to get quotes from across the structured credit insurance market, helping insurance buyers purchase risk coverage at reduced costs.

“In the past, trade finance was bogged down by lengthy risk assessment and underwriting processes, and accessing credit could take days or weeks, especially if it was a business’s first time doing so,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.

However, as banks and their partners bulk up their digital toolkits, lending has become increasingly accelerated, meaning that many trade finance loans can now be approved and paid within the same day.