Building the Next-Gen Global Trade Finance Engine

By Perry Johnson - February 9, 2023

While Trade finance is an essential function of global commerce, its workflows have remained largely unchanged for centuries and digitalization is not widely adopted, yet. This has led to a number of inefficiencies, from time consuming human data entry to slow cash dispersal, unscalable back office systems, and an inability to adopt modern software solutions. Additionally, trade finance and supply chain data is messy and difficult to fully understand, making many financing decisions a form of art rather than science. These complexities have represented a barrier for traditional financial institutions to enter the industry, and make it harder for businesses to seek the financing they need to grow their cash flows and thus grow their businesses.

At Fishtail, we are leveraging cutting edge data science to bring Trade Finance to the twenty first century. Our team of technologists, data scientists, and trade finance experts are applying decades of experience in maritime supply chain intelligence, machine learning and computing to build the next-gen global trade finance engine. We’re building the infrastructure and scaffolding to support global trade, allowing borrowers to get their capital faster, enabling better rates and equipping lenders with the data-driven rigor so they can drive improved holistic risk assessments while minimizing human mistakes.

Following the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, Artificial Intelligence and large language models are currently in the spotlight at a mainstream level, outside and beyond the machine learning community. The current hype still needs to be demonstrated by shipping real products that deliver value to customers. That said, thanks to this increasing interest in generative artificial intelligence, transformers, large language models, access to computing power, and supporting machine learning tooling, building a machine learning company right now is a very exciting endeavor. The Machine Learning Renaissance is here.

We believe that the leading companies in this space will be the ones capable of applying general purpose AI tools (vs reinventing the wheel) and leveraging domain-specific data to fine tune models - to unlock automation and intelligence unique to their industry.

At Fishtail we are applying data science up and down the stack in our platform. We are envisioning and building a platform which enables customers to effortlessly provide required documentation and rapidly receive a credit decision. At the same time, developing and nurturing trustworthy engagements with our capital providers, trust built on the foundation that our risk assessments are the most accurate available. This is all made possible by leveraging the latest AI and machine learning technologies and utilizing innovative financial and supply chain data sources. We’re continuously experimenting with many trade finance use cases utilizing cutting-edge data science methods such as document understanding, supply chain risk analysis, and graph network analysis of trade relationships.

We’re just getting started here at Fishtail, but we aren’t just dreaming of this future, we’re building towards the global trade finance engine for the next era every single day. Onwards.

Contact us to access trade financing or learn more about what we are building.