Trade Finance Document Checking (LCs, Bills of Lading)

• Head of Trade Finance Operations
• Trade Services Document Checker
• Trade Centre Manager
• Head of Trade Compliance

A single LC presentation can contain a draft, commercial invoice, packing list, bill of lading, insurance certificate, certificate of origin and inspection certificate, each to be checked against the MT700 terms and against each other. Checkers do this within the five-banking-day examination period of UCP 600, often across many presentations at once, and both a missed discrepancy and a wrongly raised one carry cost.

We build an examination assistant for trade operations. It reads the credit and every amendment from the SWIFT messages and builds a structured list of terms and document requirements. It then extracts data from each document in the presentation, including scanned bills of lading and stamped certificates. A rules layer encodes checks drawn from UCP 600, ISBP and your bank's internal practice, and a language model compares goods descriptions and clauses where wording differs. The output is a draft discrepancy list, each item citing the document, field and credit clause, plus screening data passed to your sanctions process. The checker accepts, edits or rejects each item.

• Parses MT700 and MT707 messages into a structured term sheet, applying accepted amendments in order
• Extracts data from invoices, packing lists, bills of lading, airway bills, insurance documents and certificates of origin
• Checks dates, amounts, tolerances, ports, presentation period and consistency across documents
• Reads bill of lading notations and clauses that bear on clean, on-board and transhipment status
• Packages vessel, port, party and goods data for the bank's sanctions and dual-use screening
• Drafts discrepancy wording for the checker to use in an MT734 or MT750 message

1. 01Load the creditThe MT700 and any accepted MT707 amendments are parsed into a term sheet of conditions and required documents.
2. 02Receive the presentationScanned or electronic documents arrive from the trade front office or customer portal and are split and classified.
3. 03Extract document dataGoods description, quantities, values, dates, ports and parties are extracted with page references.
4. 04Run examination rulesChecks on credit terms, cross-document consistency and presentation timing produce candidate discrepancies with confidence.
5. 05Screen and routeParties, vessels, ports and goods go to the existing screening process, and uncertain items are marked for close review.
6. 06Checker decisionThe document checker accepts, edits or rejects each item and records the examination outcome in the trade system.

1. Intake
   • SWIFT MT700 and MT707 message parser
   • Scanned presentation intake from the trade front office
   • Grouping by LC and bill reference
2. Document understanding
   • OCR tuned for carrier and insurer layouts
   • Classifier for trade document types
   • LLM extractor with per-document schemas
3. Examination
   • Rule engine for credit terms and cross-document checks
   • LLM comparison of goods descriptions and clauses
   • Screening data packager
4. Review
   • Checker workbench with side-by-side document view
   • Discrepancy wording drafts
5. Integration and audit
   • Trade finance back-office adapter
   • Audit log of findings and checker decisions

The document checker decides every discrepancy and the examination outcome; the assistant only drafts. Sanctions and dual-use hits are decided by the compliance team in the bank's existing screening process.

• Trade finance back-office system (via API or file exchange)
• SWIFT interface for MT7xx messages
• Sanctions screening system already in use
• Document imaging or management system
• Customer trade portal for document uploads

• Every finding cites the document, page and credit clause it relies on
• No SWIFT message is sent without checker approval
• Examination rules versioned and approved by trade operations before use
• Low-confidence fields marked visibly, never silently accepted
• Customer and counterparty data kept in the bank's chosen environment

• Examination rules are drawn from ICC UCP 600, ISBP and the bank's own practice; the checker remains responsible for the examination.
• Supports the bank's trade-based money laundering controls by surfacing data for screening; it does not replace the sanctions system.

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