Use casesFinancial institutions & fintech

  • Bank
  • Participation bank

Trade finance document checking

Each presentation under a letter of credit is a stack of invoices, bills of lading, and certificates; every discrepancy has to be found and named within five banking days.

With the systemEach document read and checked against the credit and the others, every party screened; the specialist decides.

Who decides
Trade-finance specialist

Presented by the exporter's bank · 4 November 2026Illustrative

Insurance certificate · steel coils, CIF Mersin

We certify that the goods described below are insured against all risks from the port of loading to Mersin. Date of issue: 29 October 2026.

→ later than the B/L on-board date, 27 October

The document as it arrives. In red, what the system marks for your expert.

1. The work

Today

  1. ReadThe exporter or its bank presents the documents, by courier on paper or scanned: commercial invoice, bill of lading, packing list, certificate of origin, insurance document, and any certificate the credit asks for; a trade-operations specialist reads each by hand.
  2. CompareThey check every document against the credit (the MT700 and its amendments: the goods, the documents required, the additional conditions) and against each other: names, addresses, goods, quantities, weights, dates, ports, and amounts.
  3. ScreenParties, banks, the vessel, and the ports are screened against the sanctions lists the bank applies, and the goods against what its policy restricts.
  4. WriteDiscrepancies are written up by hand; if the bank refuses, it sends one notice listing all of them, between banks as an MT734.
  5. DecideThe specialist decides, within five banking days of presentation, whether the documents comply, and if not, asks the applicant whether it will accept the discrepancies.

With the system

  1. ReadThe vision-language model reads each scanned document, stamps and handwriting included, and returns its fields: parties, goods, quantities, weights, dates, ports, the on-board notation, and signatures.SLM
  2. CompareThe agent hands each document to a worker that checks it against the credit's terms and the other documents; dates, amounts, and quantities are computed by your written checks, run as code.Agentic AI
  3. ScreenThe agent screens every party, bank, vessel, and port through your screening service; any hit goes to the specialist and to compliance, and the agent never disposes of a match.Agentic AI
  4. WriteThe SLM writes the examination sheet in your checklist: each discrepancy with its document, field, and the credit term it breaks, and a draft refusal listing them all.SLM
  5. DecideThe trade-finance specialist checks the sheet against the documents and decides, as before, whether the presentation complies; any refusal and any waiver request are theirs to send.Person decides

What lands on the desk

The specialist gets every document already read, each one checked against the credit and the others, dates and amounts computed by your own checks, and every party screened. Each discrepancy names its document and the term it breaks; the specialist decides and sends.

FIG. 1 · Examination sheetIllustrative
Import letter of credit · at sight · presented 04.11.2026Steel coils, CIF Mersin

VLM · documents read

  • metCommercial invoice
  • metBill of lading, on-board notation dated
  • metPacking list and certificate of origin
  • metInsurance certificate

Agent · against the credit and each other

  • metGoods description matches the creditMT700 45A
  • flaggedGross weight on the packing list differs from the bill of lading46A
  • flaggedInsurance certificate dated after the on-board date46A
  • metParties, vessel, and ports screenedno hit

Code · dates and amounts

  • PresentedBefore the credit's expiry
  • ShippedBefore the latest shipment date
  • AmountWithin the credit amount

SLM · examination sheet

Two discrepancies, each with its document, field, and credit term; a draft refusal listing both is ready for the specialist.

  • SLM
  • Agent
  • Code

Why a person decidesWhether the presentation complies, and any refusal, are the specialist's; a sanctions hit goes to compliance.

DecidesTrade-finance specialist

2. The system

For your technical team — skip it if you like.

How it works

In

  • Scanned invoice, bill of lading, packing list
  • Certificate of origin, insurance document
  • Stamps, handwriting, and signatures

  1. VLM · reads scanned documents

    Document reader

    Fine-tuned to return each document's fields

    Reads

    • Everything under In

    Out

    • Document type and issuer
    • Parties, goods, quantities, and weights
    • Dates, ports, vessel, on-board notation
    • Amounts and currency

  2. Agent · prepares

    Examination agent

    Coordinator and one worker per document; read-only

    Reads

    • The credit: MT700 and its amendments
    • The fields of each document

    Out

    • Each document against the credit's terms
    • The documents against each other
    • Parties, banks, vessel, and ports screened
    • Missing documents listed

  3. Code · calculates

    Date and amount checks

    Your written checks, run as code; no model

    Reads

    • Dates, amounts, and quantities
    • The credit's expiry and latest shipment date

    Out

    • Presentation against expiry
    • Shipment against the latest allowed date
    • Amounts and quantities against the credit

  4. SLM · understands

    Examination-sheet writer

    SLM, in your checklist and refusal templates

    Reads

    • The checks and their sources
    • Your checklist

    Out

    • Each discrepancy with its document and term
    • A draft refusal listing them all
    • Points of doubt marked

  5. Decision

    Trade-finance specialist

    Reads

    • The examination sheet and the documents

    Out

    • Decides whether the presentation complies
    • Sends any refusal as one notice
    • Asks the applicant about a waiver
    • A sanctions hit goes to compliance
How the agent's work is arrangedOrchestrator–workers

Orchestrator–workers

Each presentation brings its own set of documents, so a coordinator plans one worker per document present and assembles their findings into one sheet.

How the models are trained and tested

Your expert writes the test first. A step the test does not need is skipped, and we say why.

Show the training steps

Small language model (SLM) and vision-language model (VLM)

  1. Test set

    200–400 past presentations with your senior trade-finance specialists' examination sheets, each discrepancy labeled with its document, field, and credit term.

  2. Dataset

    Past credits, presentations, and the sheets and refusals your team sent; personal and company data masked in training copies where the test allows.

  3. Continued pre-training (CPT)If needed

    Only if the base model fails the test on trade and shipping vocabulary.

  4. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT)

    On reading each document type, stamps and handwriting included, and on your checklist and refusal templates.

  5. Reinforcement learning (RL)Skipped

    Skipped: reading fields and writing to a checklist are taught by fine-tuning, and no further reward is needed.

  6. Retrieval

    Retrieval supplies the credit's own terms, your checklist, and your bank's licensed copy of the ICC rules; dates and amounts come from the code checks, never from the model.

  7. Monitoring

    The specialist reviews every sheet; a missed or wrongly raised discrepancy joins the next test.

Where the agentic system stops

The trade-finance specialist decides whether each presentation complies, sends any refusal as one notice listing every discrepancy, and asks the applicant about a waiver.

Show its tools, limits, and record
Tools and access
Reads the credit and its amendments from your trade-finance system and the scanned documents from document management; runs your screening service; read-only otherwise; writes only the examination sheet.
May not
Decide that a presentation complies or is discrepant, send a refusal or any message to another bank, pay, accept, or release documents, dispose of a sanctions match, contact the applicant or the beneficiary, or grant itself any access.
Who decides and the written limit
Trade-finance specialistThe trade-finance specialist decides whether each presentation complies, sends any refusal as one notice listing every discrepancy, and asks the applicant about a waiver. The system never decides compliance, never pays, accepts, or releases documents, never sends a message to another bank, and never disposes of a sanctions match: any hit goes to compliance.
Stops when
Any sanctions or watch-list hit, goods your policy restricts, a document it cannot read with confidence, or a credit term it cannot map to a check: the sheet goes to the specialist, marked; a sanctions hit also goes to compliance.
Record
Every document and field read, each check and the credit term behind it, the screening results, the rule versions, the sheet, and who decided and sent.

How agentic systems stay inside limits

3. Value and conditions

Where the time goes, and what your institution will measure.

Where the value comes from

  1. Presentations decided well inside the five banking days.
  2. Fewer discrepancies missed or wrongly raised.
  3. Specialist hours freed for the hard presentations.

What your institution measures

  • Time from presentation to decision
  • Discrepancies raised later by another bank
  • Refusals the presenter disputes
  • Specialist time per presentation

Measured in the Decision Blueprint

Today's time from presentation to decision and specialist time per presentation, from your trade log, set the baseline; your institution sets the target.

Conditions

The rules, the data, and the known error, with its guard.

  • Credits are issued under the ICC's Uniform Customs and Practice for Documentary Credits (UCP 600), and documents are examined with the ICC's International Standard Banking Practice (ISBP 821, 2023) beside it; both are ICC publications sold under license, so the checks are written from your bank's licensed copy and no rule text is quoted here.
  • Each bank has at most five banking days following the day of presentation to decide whether a presentation complies, and a refusal is a single notice (UCP 600 art. 14(b) and 16(c), as cited in the ICC's published DOCDEX decision 335).
  • Assets of people and entities listed under the United Nations Security Council resolutions the law names are frozen once the Presidential decision is published in the Resmî Gazete, without delay (Law 6415 art. 5); a screening hit stops the sheet for compliance.
  • No machine-learning model is needed: what a presentation must meet is written in the credit and the rules. Documents stay on your servers.

Start here

We take a month of presentations with your trade-operations team, time each step from receipt to decision, collect your checklists, and test the document reader on your own scanned documents before anything is built.

Who builds it Every engagement is led by an engineer who has built machine-learning models that real decisions run on since 2012, and language models and agentic systems in production since 2024. About eqlx

Request a Decision BlueprintWhat the Decision Blueprint covers

Equalize the gap.

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Start with a Decision BlueprintTalk to the engineer

https://eqlx.ai/use-cases/trade-documents · Printed copy; the website is the current version.