NatWest has partnered with Cleareye.ai to use AI-powered automation and compliance checks to strengthen trade finance operations and combat financial crime.
\nThe partnership aims to help UK SMEs by improving fraud detection, accelerating trade processes, and reducing exposure to trade-based money laundering, which accounts for an estimated $1.6 trillion in illicit flows each year.
\nWhile AI is enhancing financial crime prevention across UK banks, it is also being exploited by fraudsters to create synthetic trade documents, deepfakes, and automated cyber attacks.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, 27 May, British bank NatWest announced its partnership with specialist artificial intelligence (AI) provider Cleareye.ai.<\/p>\n
Through adopting Cleareye.ai\u2019s AI-powered platform, ClearTrade, NatWest aims to automate data extraction and classification from both digital and paper trade finance documents. This should not only simplify trade operations but also help detect financial crime.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Trade Finance Global (TFG) heard from Michael Gilham, Trade Product Lead, Commercial and Institutional at NatWest. \u201cThe enhancement Cleareye.ai brings to our compliance checks will strengthen our ability to detect suspicious transactions, helping to keep our customers safe and increasing confidence in international trade,\u201d said Gilham.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ClearTrade will carry out automated checks to ensure trade processes are aligned with the International Chamber of Commerce\u2019s (ICC) procedures, targeted at standardising global trade. It will also conduct trade-based money laundering (TBML) checks to tackle operational risk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
TBML refers<\/a> to the process of disguising the revenue made from a crime and moving illicit value across borders. It accounts for an estimated $1.6 trillion<\/a> in illicit flows annually. Red flags for detecting TBML include<\/a> peculiar payment behaviours, trade patterns contradictory to financial profiles, offshore accounts, high-risk practices, and the unusually fast movement of funds.\u00a0<\/p>\n Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which lack sophisticated fraud detection mechanisms and are often reliant on non-bank lenders due to the high rejection rates of their financing requests \u2013 estimated at around 41%<\/a> in 2025 \u2013 are disproportionately impacted<\/a> by fraudulent practices like TBML.<\/p>\n According to Deloitte, AI improves fraud identification rates on average by 20%<\/a>, with potential outliers reaching 300%.<\/p>\n NatWest suggests that the innovative technology provided by ClearTrade could strengthen protection against fraud for UK SMEs.\u201cCleareye.ai will enable us to deliver faster for customers by increasing automation. Particularly for our busy SME customers, this is really important, allowing them to focus on what they\u2019re great at and driving their success,\u201d explained Gilham.\u00a0<\/p>\n Other UK banks also have similar cooperations: HSBC collaborates<\/a> with Quantexa, an AI platform that analyses financial crime as an interconnected visual map, rather than as isolated incidents; Santander UK utilises<\/a> a fintech ThetaRay\u2019s cognitive AI model that detects suspicious account activity and has even helped uncover cases of human trafficking; and nine out of 10 major UK banks are part of the ThreatMetrix Network, where embedded AI models passively assess customer behaviour and determine scams before the transaction is even completed.<\/p>\n Yet, in financial crime, AI acts as a double-edged sword, used by trading fraudsters to create synthetic trade documents and deepfakes that falsely authorise trade agreements, and to automate hacking attempts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NatWest has partnered with Cleareye.ai to use AI-powered automation and compliance checks to strengthen trade finance operations and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51016,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[21386],"tags":[25459,25460,1284,11944,16215,25461,12614,9881,7955,10529,25462,25463,15726],"class_list":["post-51015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-natwest","tag-ai-fraud-detection","tag-anti-money-laundering","tag-automation","tag-banking-technology","tag-financial-crime","tag-fraud-detection","tag-fraud-prevention","tag-hsbc","tag-natwest","tag-santander-uk","tag-trade-finance-documents","tag-trade-based-money-laundering-tbml","tag-uk-banking"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}