Wall Street bank JP Morgan has made a strategic investment in a fintech startup focused on trade finance.
Cleareye.ai operates a platform that aims to automate as much of the trade finance process as possible including document analysis and compliance.
JP Morgan is already a Cleareye customer, and for the last year it has been using the fintech’s ClearTrade platform to map data from the nearly 4 million documents it receives annually directly onto the back’s back-office systems.
The strategic alliance between Cleareye and JP Morgan’s trade and working capital group comes at a time when the trade finance market is undergoing a digital transformation in a bid to reduce the amount of manual processes in what is a heavily paper-based market.
“Future proofing trade operations has been at the forefront of J.P. Morgan’s digital strategy in Trade & Working Capital,” said James Fraser, global head of trade & working capital for 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.”
No financial details of the investment were disclosed.