"A single contract could run to 100 pages. Everything has to be in triplicate and a shipment of, say, 500 shirts in various colours and sizes — each taking its own page — quickly stacks up. For now, it falls to clerks to pull out relevant information: from dates and addresses to the name of the ship’s captain. The typical transaction requires 65 pieces of information to be pulled out of an average 40 pages."
The pilot is being used for global trade and shipment contracts. "The IBM analytics technology, initially in English language import and export bills — about a third of the total paper volume — will enable HSBC to jettison much of the mundane clerical work and increase accuracy. The IBM technology that can extract information from non-standardised papers and feed it straight into bank processing systems."
Specifics undisclosed
Contract documents
Pilot; results not yet available