JPMorgan's Trade and Working Capital Group has made a strategic investment in Cleareye.ai, a financial technology company focused on trade finance, the two firms confirmed yesterday (Tuesday). Cleareye.ai expedite trade finance processes through automation.

For the past year, JPMorgan has been using the fintech firm's software to map data directly to its back-office systems from approximately 4 million documents it receives annually. The strategic investment, whose financial terms were not disclosed, comes at a time the trade finance industry is undergoing digital transformation.

JPMorgan Automates Trade Finance

Trade finance is a general term referring to the financial services and products for businesses doing international trade or imports and exports. Currently, the sector is characterized by manual processes and a lack of standardization and innovation.

"Future-proofing trade operations have been at the forefront of J.P. Morgan's digital strategy in Trade and Working Capital," commented James Fraser, the Global Head of Trade and Working Capital at JP Morgan. "A manually intensive industry loaded with paper and lacking standardization, burdened by an increasing cost base, needs real innovation in order to transform."

Headquartered in California with offices in New York, Bahrain, and India, Cleareye.ai describes itself as an Artificial Intelligence and a Machine Learning platform that simplifies banking. It uses document digitization technology to extract, validate, and classify unstructured data.

Commenting on the investment, Cleareye.ai’s CEO and Co-Founder, Mariya George, said: "We are thrilled to increase our work with JPMorgan, leveraging their investment to reinvest in our technological innovation, bringing expert solutions powered by Artificial Intelligence to the forefront of bank's digital strategies."

Operational Efficiency

In conjunction with JP Morgan's investment, George added that Cleareye.ai was working to enhance operational efficiency through global solutions. Additionally, the fintech firm is aiming for digital innovations that can benefit trade finance banks, it said.

Meanwhile, in May, CNBC reported that JPMorgan was working on a ChatGPT-enabled software that selects investments for customers. Dubbed IndexGPT, the publication added that the bank had filed patents for the software. Other banks, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, are reportedly exploring OpenAI's ChatGPT uses in the banking sector.