Global bank compresses trade finance from weeks to days, cutting costs 90%

Manual Effort Across Trade Finance

Each month, this bank’s trade finance team processed thousands of requests, each requiring document validation, compliance screening, and coordination across multiple internal systems. 

With FTEs dedicated to this single scope and each request consuming approximately 3 hours of manual effort per shipment, the operating economics quickly became structurally difficult to sustain at scale.

Under these conditions, resolution cycles can stretch into multiple weeks, becoming not just an efficiency issue but also a growth and profitability constraint. Slow resolution could reduce throughput, extend customer delays, increase exposure to errors and fraud, and slow capital and cash turnover, making it harder to improve outcomes without adding proportional headcount.

The bank’s leadership recognized this wasn’t a process optimization problem, and instead it required a fundamentally different operating model. One capable of autonomous execution across the full trade finance workflow while preserving the regulatory control and auditability the business demanded.

Autonomous trade finance execution under governance

The entire organization aligned on a single objective: taking resolution cycles from weeks to 2-3 days through autonomous execution.

To achieve that, Otera’s autonomous agents were deployed across the core trade finance workflow, handling document validation, compliance screening, and exception routing. Cases now move through the pipeline without manual intervention, unless an exception is flagged by a specialized AI agent, at which point human operators review and resolve. 

Every autonomous decision carries a full audit trail, ensuring traceability and regulatory compliance throughout, all while ensuring governed autonomy: agents execute end-to-end while operators retain full visibility and override capability on exceptions.

From Manual to Agentic-First Banking

Within the initial trade finance scope, the bank’s shift to autonomous execution delivered measurable impact across every key operational and financial metric:

• Autonomous execution became the default: the majority of cases now process end-to-end without manual intervention
• Resolution compressed 7x: from multi-week cycles to day-level turnaround
• 90% workforce cost reduction: operational capacity has been reinvested into AI optimization and higher-value client engagement, turning a cost center into a strategic advantage.