Artificial Intelligence for Efficiency Sustainability and Inclusivity in TradeTech 2025

A total of 80% of trade involves some form of financing, and trade finance tools range from credit lines to payment guarantees to specialized insurance.16 Access to credit is especially critical for SMEs, which might otherwise struggle to front the costs of cross-border trade. AI can work alongside other technologies to reduce the gap between the demand for and availability of trade finance – a funding shortfall of $2.5 trillion in 2022.17 AI is offering improvements in the following domains: –Reducing inefficiency: Reliance on paper- based documentation greatly increases processing delays. –Lowering barriers to entry: Onboarding costs, transaction fees and other information gaps can make lenders cautious about relatively unknown SMEs. –Decreasing fraud risk: Paper-based documentation, which is central to trade finance, makes the field vulnerable to fraud. –Increasing transparency: Trade finance involves a complex array of intermediaries and processing steps, which impede transparency. One of the most socially significant contributions of AI in trade finance involves greater inclusivity, as lack of credit disproportionately hurts SMEs. Challenges faced by SMEs include a lack of collateral and long-term relationships with bankers, insufficient credit or transaction history, and unfavourable market conditions, resulting in 45% of trade finance rejections being attributed to SMEs.18 AI can help level the playing field by providing new tools for lenders and connectivity with borrowers. AI can work alongside other technologies to reduce the gap between the demand for and availability of trade finance – a funding shortfall of $2.5 trillion in 2022. Breaking trade finance barriers in Africa BOX 10 Jetstream’s AI-enabled tools are facilitating access to trade finance for SMEs in West Africa, resulting in more than $8 million in loans and financial guarantees to hundreds of businesses in Nigeria and Ghana. This achieves a loss rate that is less than half the regional industry average.  At the start, the JetAssist application used AI to pull status updates from templated emails sent by global shipping lines and push them to a dedicated Slack channel to efficiently parse and relay critical shipping information, improving visibility and communication. Building on this using optical character recognition (OCR), data is now extracted from financial and logistics documents issued by third parties. It is then uploaded to a structured database to be fed into algorithms which help to cut down credit decisioning time from the industry-standard of around one month to less than one minute.  Source: Jetstream Africa Supply chain finance depends on in-depth understanding of the risk profile of a transaction, including the actors involved and their track records. AI helps assess the relevant factors to reach a financing decision. Further, the combination of AI and optical character recognition helps digitize the underlying invoices, shipping documents, customs filings and other documents exchanged between buyers and sellers. Digitalizing such data improves efficiency, reduces errors and accelerates exchanges. For example, Twinco Capital uses AI to extract information from unstructured shipment paperwork, reducing processing time by 80% and increasing accuracy. 20 Artificial Intelligence for Efficiency, Sustainability and Inclusivity in TradeTech