Solution

Trade Finance Document Automation

Read, structure and cross-check trade documents — letters of credit, bills of lading, commercial invoices and certificates — to support faster, more consistent examination.

The problem

Why this process resists automation

Document examination under a letter of credit is detailed, time-boxed and highly manual. A single presentation can run to dozens of pages that must agree with each other and with the credit terms.

  • Presentations arriving as large scanned bundles
  • Terms spread across the credit, amendments and the documents themselves
  • Discrepancy checking dependent on individual examiner experience
  • Tight examination windows with limited specialist capacity
  • Inconsistent discrepancy notes across branches

Today

How the work happens now

  1. 01Presentation received and logged
  2. 02Examiner separates and reads each document
  3. 03Credit terms and amendments are re-read for each check
  4. 04Details are compared across documents manually
  5. 05Discrepancies are written up in free text
  6. 06Second examiner repeats the review for control purposes

How PrismIQ solves it

Trade Finance Document Processing with document intelligence

Credit and amendment parsing

The letter of credit and its amendments are structured into terms that later checks can reference directly.

Per-document extraction

Bills of lading, commercial invoices, packing lists, insurance certificates and certificates of origin are each read according to their own structure.

Consistency checking

Beneficiary, applicant, goods description, quantities, amounts, ports, dates and shipment terms are compared across all presented documents.

Structured discrepancy candidates

Mismatches are presented as consistent, named candidates with the evidence attached — the examiner decides.

Examiner in control

PrismIQ prepares the comparison. Acceptance, waiver and refusal decisions stay with your trade operations team.

Documents

Document types handled

Letters of credit and amendmentsCommercial invoicesBills of lading, air waybills and transport documentsPacking lists and weight listsCertificates of originInsurance certificates and policiesInspection and quality certificatesBills of exchange

Extraction

Data captured

  • Credit number, issue and expiry dates, available-with details
  • Applicant and beneficiary names and addresses
  • Goods description, quantity, unit price and value
  • Incoterms, ports of loading and discharge, latest shipment date
  • Vessel, voyage, container and marks
  • Presentation period and required documents list

Validation

Checks applied to every document

  • Goods description consistency across invoice, transport document and credit
  • Amount within credit value and tolerance
  • Shipment and presentation dates within the credit window
  • Ports and Incoterms consistent with the credit
  • Required documents present and complete
  • Beneficiary and applicant naming consistent across documents

Workflow

End-to-end processing flow

  1. 1Ingest the presentation bundle
  2. 2Split and classify each document
  3. 3Parse the credit and amendments into structured terms
  4. 4Extract fields per document type
  5. 5Run cross-document and credit-term comparisons
  6. 6Present discrepancy candidates with evidence
  7. 7Record the examiner's decision and export to the trade system

Integration

Where the data goes

Trade finance platformsCore bankingSWIFT message dataREST APIDocument management systems

Security

Deployment and control

Encryption in transit and at restRole-based access controlComplete audit trailsOn-premise, private cloud or hybrid deploymentConfigurable data retention

Outcomes

What changes for the business

Faster examination

Examiners start from a structured comparison instead of a stack of scans.

More consistent discrepancies

The same checks, named the same way, across every branch and examiner.

Better capacity use

Specialist time is spent on judgement rather than transcription.

Traceable decisions

Every check, evidence reference and decision is recorded.

Outcomes describe the design intent of the solution. Actual results depend on document complexity, workflow design, integration requirements and deployment environment.

Frequently asked questions

Bring trade finance document processing into straight-through processing

Book an enterprise demo and we will walk through your document types, validation rules and integration architecture.