Document intelligence for trade finance operations

The challenge

An operations team was manually reading shipping documents, invoices and letters of credit, checking them against contract terms and re-keying the results. Volume had roughly doubled in two years, headcount had not, and errors were caught late in the process where they were most expensive to fix.

The approach

1. 01

   Ran a two-week discovery to inventory document types, exception rates and where errors were actually being introduced.

2. 02

   Built a layout-aware extraction pipeline producing validated, schema-constrained output rather than free text.

3. 03

   Implemented a rules layer that checks extracted values against contract terms and flags discrepancies with citations back to the source page.

4. 04

   Added a confidence threshold routing uncertain documents into a human review queue, with corrections feeding the evaluation set.

5. 05

   Deployed inside the client's own cloud tenancy with full audit logging of every model call.

The outcome

Straight-through processing for the majority of standard documents, with the operations team's attention concentrated on genuine exceptions rather than transcription.