ČSOB Deploys RPA in Trade Finance

ČSOB is one of the largest commercial banks serving the Czech Republic. As a universal bank, ČSOB provides a wide range of financial services and banking products, including trade finance. But acting as a third party for transactions comes with risks. By partnering with Deloitte and Blue Prism, ČSOB has the processes needed to reduce these risks.

Challenge in Trade Finance

Trade finance makes it quicker and easier for importers and exporters to make business transactions through trade. However, it must follow the four-eyes principal, which ensures approval from at least two people.

This can be incredibly time-consuming, especially if the findings don’t align. Two employees must manually check against a list of blacklisted items, countries and terms based on internal and external policies. And the ČSOB team was managing around 8,000 cases per year.

A bank guarantee could only be issued after approval. ČSOB needed to find a way to automate this process, not only to reduce costs but to increase speed and remove risks.

Solution for Trade Finance

ČSOB has a strong partnership with Deloitte — they cooperate daily. So ČSOB turned to Deloitte’s team with expertise in RPA technologies and put a robust governance structure in place to ensure continued success. The team worked with the bank’s trade finance experts to task Blue Prism digital workers with checking controls before bank guarantees are prepared.

All applicants, beneficiaries and any other bank guarantors are now automatically checked against the Czech national register to ensure they’ve not been blacklisted for engaging in illicit activities. What used to take 20 minutes is now done within five minutes, saving ČSOB around 4,000 hours a year.

Once digital workers have performed these checks, an overview of each processed case is prepared for manual review, detailing the result of each individual control. And this is just the beginning. The program has seen an impressive return on investment. ČSOB has fully embraced intelligent process automation and has plans to expand into predictive planning and fraud management in the near future.