BANKS are looking to cut cost and enhance their solutions via automation through artificial intelligence (AI) technology. As such, treasury professionals are more likely to be exposed to AI through their engagement with their banking partners.

In both trade finance and cash management, the use of AI can power solutions which extract information from documents automatically, without the need for manual input. This allows banks to offer their treasury clients more streamlined services that reduce the time it would take to execute a transaction. HSBC and IBM, for example, worked on a platform last year that enabled trade finance documents to be digitally extracted and automatically entered into HSBC’s trade finance system. According to IBM, the AI system can identify essential information from a variety of trade documents.

Similarly, in cash management, Bank of America Merrill Lynch has its Intelligent Receivables solution that uses AI to help treasury professionals match payments with the corresponding remittance information. “Treasurers don’t always know who is paying and for what they are paying for,” explains Babu Vaidyanathan, head of receivables and bank notes product, Asia-Pacific, at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

“The solution has the capability – using the artificial intelligence – to capture information from several sources including email and PDFs, to match payments with remittance information. Using this information, the system relays this into the backend of the client, it takes up an open invoice in the client’s ERP and auto knocks that off,” says Vaidyanathan.

Further, when documents are submitted to a bank, it is now more likely they will be reviewed by AI technology rather than by a person, for instance for anti-money laundering (AML) purposes. In Singapore, financial technology company Silent Eight hopes to offer banks an AI overlay for their AML monitoring systems. “Banks need to do a lot of due diligence and they have to dig through a lot of data and always need to be smarter than criminals,” highlights Martin Markiewicz, CEO of Silent Eight.

And beyond just submitting documents, requests for information are also more frequently dealt with by chatbots, an AI-powered auto-messaging technology. This has grown in popularity over the past year, mostly with consumer banks which utilize chatbots to answer basic customer queries, such as how to apply for a loan or make an international transfer.

While still early days, chatbots will likely slowly make their way into the commercial/corporate banking space as banks seek to cut costs by implementing new methods of automation. The National Australia Bank just last September introduced its virtual banker service designed to answer around 200 common questions from business customers without the need for human involvement.