0:00
I think it’s very difficult to be the early adopter because there’s often risk associated with that.

0:04
We have been working really hard to digitize trade and we’ve really focused on that and we have seen some real great successes.

0:10
We’ve seen transaction times really reduce.

0:12
I really enjoyed John’s phrase of allowing machines to do the ordinary so humans can do the extraordinary.

0:18
You think about leveraging that element with a Genentech AI and the way that it will transform trade is going to be
unbelievable.

0:31
Trade finance has been traditionally complex and paper intense, and digitalisation in this space is complicated
by a large number of counterparts, often acting in different jurisdictions, Regulatory pressures and also
macroeconomic trends.

0:49
From Lloyds Bank perspective, what are the biggest challenges that you face today in delivering efficient trade
financing services to your customers that have increasing demands?

1:02
I think in the documentary trade space there are two key challenges that we face.

1:07
One is the paper problem within trade, which you’ve just mentioned, Elena, and I’d say the other is the skills
problem within our operations team.

1:15
So I’ll take the first one first.

1:17
The paper problem, despite the legal enablers, the technology enablers that we’ve seen over the last few years,
trade is still dominated by paper.

1:25
I think that the stats are 28 billion pieces of paper going around the world every year when we’re seeing a
growth in digitalisation, but it’s a slow growth.

1:35
And our clients, they expect a digital first experience when they’re dealing with us like they get in their other
banking products.

1:41
Unfortunately today it’s that’s not the case for most clients in in documentary trade.

1:46
But Lloyd’s has been at the forefront of trying to deliver documentary trade on a digital basis.

1:51
And the solution is digital trade, harnessing the Electronic Trade Documents Act to allow for documents to
move seamlessly between parties at a much quicker rate and avoiding the bottlenecks that we see in paper, the
delays in financing, the delays in documents being couriered all across the globe.

2:09
We’ve been doing digital transactions since 2022.

2:13
I’m pleased to say this year we’ve done hundreds of digital transactions.

2:17
We actually did a calculation where between four and five times as many digital transactions in 2025 so far
compared to the whole of 2024.

2:24
So we are moving in the right space, but it is difficult because we’ve got to get all parties aligned to digitise
transactions.

2:33
So that’s a key element that we’re working on on a day-to-day basis.

2:38
So that’s the first problem.

2:39
The second problem, as I mentioned before, is the skills, the skills gap.

2:42
So we know that the check in and the examination of documents under UCP and under ISBP is a, is a skilled
role within trade.

2:50
It’s a role I used to do when I was in operations.

2:53
And it’s a role that really does require years of training to get to the, to the level you need to be to be able to
successfully check documents.

3:01
And we know that it’s been spoken about a lot in the industry that that the, there’s less people moving into those,
those type of niche roles.

3:08
People who are entering the workforce today want a more broader experience in banking and we’ve got people
retiring who’ve been doing those roles for 30-40 years.

3:17
So the key thing for us is being more innovative with the staff that we have with those experts and using their
time more effectively, getting machines to do the ordinary so they can do the extraordinary.

3:29
So that’s part of the reason we’ve teamed up with Cleareye.ai to to work at automating some of the processes with
the use of our experts to to check those processes and make sure that we are calling out the correct discrepancies
and keeping our clients safe.

3:44
All right.

3:44
I really like your expression of, yeah, having people doing extraordinary things and allow machines to do the
ordinary stuff.

3:53
It’s really great.

3:54
So Andrew, from the Cleareye.ai perspective, how do you address the automation challenges that banks face
today?

4:03
So we take a very complex situation and make it very easy.

4:06
So we work on three pillars.

4:08
The first is the digitisation of the document, so consuming the document into our platform, the use of AI to do
that.

4:15
We then enable the the reading of that document by extracting the information through a very accurate way.

4:21
The third pillar to that is then applying all of the various rules engines, TBML screening, text vetting to ensure
that there’s a full end to end process there for our clients.

4:30
Thank you.

4:30
And again, I really like this approach of keeping it simple, which is imperative in such complex business as
trade finance.

4:40
ClearTrade® integration with Finastrous Trade innovation platform marks a major step forward in risk reduction,

simplification and automation.

4:50
Can you share how the partnership came about and the strategic objectives of Lloyds Bank in in this initiative?

4:59
Yeah.

4:59
So as mentioned, we’ve been really keen to be really innovative and, and, and, and go ahead with digitalisation
of trade.

5:08
Even before the Electronic Trade Documents Act came into force, we were doing transactions under the
contractual framework, the Digital Negotiable Instruments initiative, and we completed a transaction on the day
the Electronic Trade Documents Act came into force.

5:21
We’ve done a number of firsts in this space.

5:23
So our focus has been on that digitisation of trade and, and solving that paper problem.

5:28
And we’ve, we’ve been recognised for that.

5:30
We’ve won the best Bank for digitalisation at the Global Trade Awards for the last two years in a row.

5:35
But we wanted to turn our focus towards that second problem and the, the, the automation of our processes.

5:41
And that was when we turned to look at it, what we could call intelligent automation.

5:47
And that’s how the Cleareye.ai partnership began.

5:49
From the outset, it was very clear to us that we wanted an integrated solution.

5:53
We wanted our operations colleagues to not have to manually move data between our core processing system,
Finastra and any other solution they use, be that ClearTrade® or be that another solution, a channel or anything
that we use.

6:07
So we’ve always worked to try and connect our solutions via APIs to our core processing solution Finastra.

6:15
So that was the a key thing that we were we were looking to do.

6:19
The use cases we were looking at really were that they could be broken down into three areas.

6:23
So one is the examination of documents for primarily credits, but also collections at a lesser level.

6:30
Another was trade based money laundering, TBML and sanction screening.

6:33
So we wanted to automate some of those processes using the data that had been extracted using ClearTrade® to fill
that data in, to automate the checks that have been done so they can then be checked by our operational experts.

6:47
We also wanted to automate the screening of nouns throughout all of those documents, so that could be fed back
into our sanction screening filter, which was already connected to TI Plus.

6:57
And finally, the other key area was data and pushing data in and out of the system.

7:03
So there’s a lot of unstructured data in documentary trade documents and our operational colleagues can’t key all
of that data into TI manually.

7:12
If they did, the cases would take too long and our clients would not be getting served.

7:16
But using the OCR to extract that data with cleareye.ai gives us the ability to take all of that data and push that
into TI, which is really beneficial for us when we’re looking at specific things, like looking at what transactions
we can digitise, who are the parties.

7:30
We’ve got that data now to hand, which we didn’t have before.

7:33
You’re right, thank you.

7:34
Thanks, John.

7:36
Andrew, do you have anything to add?

7:39
I think John sort of downplayed the role that Lloyds have within the industry.

7:42
You know, they are true pioneers and they are the leaders within the industry.

7:48
We are proud to work with them.

7:49
And actually, much like Lloyds, we’ve also been recognised as a global leader within trade.

7:54
I, I think it’s very difficult to be the early adopter because there’s often risk associated with that.

7:59
But actually, and I think perhaps John would agree with me, they’re already seeing those early rewards and are
able to separate themselves when it comes to offering that the full end to end solution.

8:08
You’re right, very good, thank you.

8:10
And probably from our perspective, I would like to highlight that the automation of the whole process, doc checking and compliance has become a sweet spot for many of the fintechs.

8:23
We see this area growing and the number of mature fintechs or innovative start-ups coming into this space is
increasing.

8:35
From our perspective, we at Finastra as a platform provider try to use a holistic approach and we stay agnostic.

8:42
We, we may integrate with any of the Fintechs that come into this place.

8:46
But John, I would like to ask you, why did you use Cleareye.ai?

8:51
So it’s been a long process.

8:54
It’s process that started probably four years ago.

8:58
We completed a proof of value exercise actually with a competitor to cleareye.ai just to try and prove can this be
done.

9:04
So we were looking at can we use OCR machine learning to check documents.

9:10
In that exercise, we looked at around 75 transactions and we compared the discrepancies on historic transactions
that we’ve completed to discrepancies that were picked out by the solution.

9:21
And what we found was that it could check documents this solution at least to the level of a human check.

9:28
So we were keen to then further this.

9:30
And in 2023, we got the ability and the funding and the support from the bank to actually go further into this and
look into this in more detail.

9:39
So we started with an RFI process.

9:42
We actually looked at 18 different companies that offer solutions of this type.

9:48
Some of those solutions were trade specific like like clear eyes.

9:52
Some of them were more agnostic as to the use case and you built your own rules as part of that exercise.

9:57
We had a few key things that we were looking for from any solution.

10:02
One was that we wanted a trade specific solution.

10:04
We knew that to codify all of the ICC rules would be a large task and we know we knew that some of the
companies already done that, so we didn’t.

10:12
We wanted to buy that off the shelf.

10:14
And the second key thing for us was although we were very digital 1st and we were first to market with a lot of
the digital trade stuff, we wanted to actually go with a tried and tested solution when it came to the automation
side of things.

10:28
So we were keen for the partner we went with to be live with other banks and most importantly we wanted those
other banks to provide us with qualitative and quantitative evidence that the solution was working for them.

10:39
So after that RFI process, we moved into an RFP process with three parties and there was a, there was an RF, a
full RFP completed and a robust POC completed where we took 35 transactions, not all of them documentary
trade transactions, some also just compliance transactions.

10:59
We ran those same 35 transactions through all three solutions.

11:03
And at the end of that process, we made the decision to pick cleareye.ai.

11:08
And to give you a bit of an idea of some of the reasons we picked clear, some of the things that stood out was
their out-of-the-box TBML and compliance check in something that was a key thing that we were looking for.

11:18
And another thing was just their client first approach.

11:22
We had a lot of bespoke requests that were governed by the way we we handled our trade today and that were
key for us because it was a very big change moving from manual docs check in to this.

11:33
We wanted to keep as many of the processes aligned to what we do today as possible and clear I we’re, we’re
happy to, to, to accommodate those changes and we felt that, you know, we could build a great relationship with
them, which I think we have amazing.

11:46
And thank you for sharing the details of the process.

11:48
I know that it is really important for our audience to understand how you’ve made this choice and how you made
this decision and what are you already seeing and what do you expect to see as a result of this process.

12:04
So we’ve been live with the integrated solution.

12:06
So that’s a full integration from Finastra TI into Cleareye.ai, but also back to Cleareye.ai.

12:13
So it’s bidirectional for just under six months now.

12:17
We’re already seeing some results.

12:18
So two of the key processes that we targeted for this, we’re actually seeing efficiency time savings on an average
transaction in the in the area of around 40%.

12:28
So that’s really positive.

12:30
There’s still some work to be done on some of the other key transactional events, but we’re confident that we
will be able to find efficiency savings.

12:37
The key things for us is efficiency savings, risk reduction and standardisation.

12:42
So that we’re always calling out the same things for any document examination that we that we complete.

12:50
OK, very good.

12:51
Thank you.

12:52
Andrew, could you elaborate on these numbers on the statistics and what else you can actually bring to our
Lloyds experience what they can expect next?

13:03
Sure.

13:04
So, so I think in terms of the numbers that they’re very self-explanatory and that’s what we would expect with
the return on investment with our clients.

13:10
I think the thing that’s often overlooked with these digital transformation programmes is that the work that goes
into it from a strategic partnership where we need to understand the problem statement and take the people with
us.

13:20
And you know, we often speak about it in terms of bringing the people on that journey.

13:24
So we take a very client first approach as John mentioned, but it’s really around having flexibility.

13:29
You know, every financial institution we work with is very similar, but also so different.

13:34
The processes within each FI is unique.

13:37
So therefore we have to be flexible in terms of what next.

13:40
We have a huge road map that we’ve shared with Lloyds already.

13:42
There’s various investments coming from both sides in terms of where we’re going.

13:46
So it’s super exciting, right, Very good.

13:50
And I really like this customer first approach and probably for us from the Fintech perspective, we always say
that technology is there and it’s just, you know up to us to take it to the place where it is most needed.

14:03
Technology is very important in this process and we always say that this is an enabler.

14:09
And maybe if we could talk about the challenges that we have overcome through the process of solving the issue
of interoperability of the systems integrating cleareye.ai and financial innovation.

14:24
John may be few good elaborate on this topic a little bit.

14:27
So with any kind of project to to connect to systems, there were, there were, there were always kind of
complexities and, and and issues, but we, I think we’ve overcome them.

14:37
Well, we’re now live with all of the connections we wanted to make between Finastra TI Plus and cleareye.ai clear
trade.

14:44
I think the biggest challenge was actually not an interoperability one that we had.

14:47
It was more of a, the mindset one in our operations team and, and building out that new process.

14:54
So let’s say I worked in our operations team for, for 10 years myself.

14:58
I’ve seen a lot of change going on.

15:00
I’ve seen all of the various different versions of TI go in and the changes that happened there.

15:03
I’ve seen workflow systems change.

15:06
But looking back, this is the biggest change for our colleagues that we’ve, we’ve, we’ve ever seen.

15:10
It’s a complete mindset change from checking documents in front of you in paper or on screen, to actually doing
an extraction process and then checking the rules to, to ensure that the right discrepancies are being picked up.

15:24
So that, that was a key one.

15:26
And there was a, there was a competency curve that we had to get over there.

15:30
But the Cleareye.ai team have been brilliant.

15:32
So we’ve, one of the things we’ve, we’ve done with our colleagues is we’ve, we’ve had sessions with them
internally, but we’ve also had the experts in the Cleareye.ai team sit on Microsoft Teams meetings on a one to one
basis with our colleagues and watch them process in this new way.

15:46
And they’ve been able to identify ways of working that can, that can speed things up.

15:50
And this efficiency gain is really something that we’ve just seen in the last couple of months.

15:55
It’s been quite a, a steep curve, but we have seen that move.

16:00
And I think a lot of that has been down to the work we’ve done to, to, to bring those colleagues forward.

16:04
But I can’t express enough how much of A change it is for our colleagues.

16:07
And our colleagues have been really brilliant in in taking on that, taking on that change.

16:12
I think I remember when I used to check documents, some of the things required knowledge and skill around
UCP.

16:19
But if you had an itemised invoice, for instance, you could be checking 17 pages of lined invoice against 17
pages of a packing list.

16:26
And a machine is always going to be able to do that better than a human.

16:29
But there are elements that you always going to need the human to check, to interpret those rules.

16:34
And I think we’ve got a good mix now.

16:36
No, absolutely.

16:37
And this is such a big shift from changing from a manual process and very much human, human focused process
into the automated 1.

16:47
And Andrew, what are the learnings that you may share with us after this process?

16:53
Yeah, I think there’s a there’s a couple that I think change is painful for a number of reasons.

16:58
And people have to embrace that.

17:00
They have to realise or we have to realise it’s a journey we have to go on together.

17:04
It’s all well and good having tools and people and fragmented processes, but unless you can really look at the
full journey, that’s when the magic really happens and understanding each step of the process.

17:15
So I think the key learnings of working with pioneers is that, you know, very much understanding from the
outset what good looks like and really being very communicative.

17:24
The other point is being completely honest with where we are.

17:27
A lot is said between, you know, expectations, return on investment.

17:31
The long tail to get there is quite often forgotten.

17:34
So we’re very close with our clients and very open with how we work.

17:38
I think also a point on where fintechs are in the ecosystem noted, there’s huge innovation.

17:43
I think there’s also a spectrum where they sit.

17:45
You have the the full out-of-the-box capability that has no customisation that cannot be flexed, that that becomes
very, very rigid.

17:52
You also then have the the hugely customized product that is very bespoke, but also super expensive and doesn’t
scale.

17:58
I think those partners that are strategic and sit in the middle and can flex, I think that’s where clients can win
faster and collectively move quicker as well.

18:08
It’s amazing a straight finance continues to evolve.

18:12
How do you continue to innovate finance together?

18:15
We’ve still got a lot of work to do on our BAU project.

18:19
As I say, we’ve seen some great benefits on some of the processes, but we’re working hard to ensure that they
extended to the other processes that we do.

18:29
But we are already looking at electronic processes and how we can utilize ClearTrade® to bring more efficiencies
there.

18:36
So some of the things I can share with you on the road map, we’re looking at the electronic rules for the ICC.

18:43
So EURCEUCP, we’re starting to see more of those transactions.

18:47
We always try to use those rules with our digital transactions.

18:50
So we’re starting to see more transactions come in that utilise those rules.

18:54
And we’re trying to work with cleareye.ai to put the rules in to ClearTrade® that allow for checking against those eRules.

19:03
So that’s a collaboration that that Lloyds and Cleareye.ai working on.

19:06
And another thing we’ve been working with our other partner Anego who we use to digitise trade documents to
look at the next stage for digital trade documents.

19:16
So for the digital trade documents that we do for most of the transactions today, there is still an unstructured data
in that document.

19:24
The document may be a document of title that is created on a reliable system under the ETDA, but the data is
still unstructured in that in that document.

19:32
Now ClearTrade® can be used as it can for paper documents for that.

19:36
But what we’re looking at now is how can we put structured data into the document so that it can be machine
read rather than it being read via OCR.

19:47
So cleareye.ai, Lloyds and Ego, we did a proof of value exercise maybe two months ago.

19:53
We looked at putting structured data into a key transport document in into a transaction that we were doing with
one of our clients.

20:00
And actually looking at can we read that document on cleareye.ai.

20:05
So on the ClearTrade® solution, we put that document into the solution, we were able to extract 100% of the data
that was embedded and compared to OCR where we you’d expect that to be around 90%, that’s a saving.

20:17
So doesn’t sound like a lot, 90% to 100.

20:20
But if you add that up with all of the documentation and the data points, it would create a big efficiency.

20:26
We know that this is something that’s going to happen overnight, but this would require structured data to be
embedded by the the people who create the documents.

20:35
But we think it’s something that in the coming years will happen as we move towards the targets of the ICC have
set and the Fit Alliance have set for digitisation.

20:44
So it’s something we’re keen to broaden across all of the key documents that were identified by the ICC in the
key Trade Documents and Data Elements report came out a couple of years ago.

20:55
All right, thank you.

20:56
Thanks, John.

20:58
Andrew, from your perspective, so I think John mentioned the work we’ve done with an EEO and that’s
something we’re super proud of and it’s moving very, very fast.

21:05
I think reflecting on the transformation journey that trade finance is on and where it was five years ago to where
it is this year and to where it’s going next year, I think that’s the bit that becomes super exciting.

21:16
I think the digitalization of documents will become table stakes probably in 24 months time.

21:20
It’s the use of AI tooling and  Genentech AI tools that becomes even more exciting thereafter.

21:26
I really enjoyed John’s phrase of allowing machines to do the ordinary so humans can do the extraordinary.

21:31
You think about leveraging that element with a Genentech AI and the way that it will transform trade is going to be
unbelievable.

21:39
Thank you so much guys for sharing the insights and hopefully in 24 months time we can gather together and
share the further details of our collaboration.

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