Cross-border trade payments can be slow, costly and complex for buyers dealing with foreign sellers. For the banks that must release the payments, highly regulated and often manual processes can be equally complex, sometimes taking days per transaction.
With automation and AI, the time to complete these cross-border payment processes could be slashed from days to just minutes, offering numerous benefits to both banks and their customers.
Complex and regulated processes
When a customer − for example, a retailer − orders stock from a foreign supplier, the payment may be categorised as either a balance of payments (BOP) 101 or BOP 103. BOP 101 relates to advance payment for imports that have not yet been shipped, while BOP 103 refers to goods that have not yet been paid for. Both require banks to make several checks before releasing payment.
Banks must carry out know your customer, anti-money-laundering and sanctions checks against the seller, their logistics firms, and even run checks on the ships transporting the goods and the shipping routes that are used. They must also ensure every reference number and line item on every invoice, shipping document and customs document match − a process that can take up to three days.
One bank alone may process thousands of significant cross-border trade payments per month, and trade volumes are growing.
For example, they must validate invoice numbers and check for duplicates and potential fraud, validate the client’s name, seller’s (sometimes also referred to as the beneficiary) name and payment instruction, match movement reference numbers, match invoices with the Bill of Lading, Airway Bill, or Road Manifest, and validate the weight and value details on transport documents. They must also cross-check customs worksheets.
In addition, the bank must track exchange rates impacting the payment.
One bank alone may process thousands of significant cross-border trade payments per month, and trade volumes are growing. In August 2025, South Africa's import volume was R167.4 billion − representing a significant number of transactions and huge amounts of work for the banks effecting the payments.
As the number of payments processed monthly continues to grow, it raises concerns about the ability of current systems to manage these transactions.
Tech offers win-win for banks and customers
For banks to scale their capabilities, improve efficiency and accuracy, and reduce time to payment, they must look to automation and AI.
Comprehensive cross-border payment platforms that use automation and AI are available in the market; however, these may not meet the needs of local banks. This is because solutions designed for customers around the world must include features to manage every currency and every country’s regulations − which comes at a significant cost.
Another reason local banks may not wish to use international, cloud-based solutions is that cross-border trade payments involve a great deal of sensitive information, and data sovereignty is a key concern. This is why there is interest in the local market in having a bespoke, AI-enabled solution to streamline workflows and automate document checks and authorisations, ensuring they are compliant with both South African and international regulations.
By using a bespoke platform harnessing optical character recognition, advanced workflow solutions, AI, machine learning and APIs to link to sanctions data and exchange rate trackers, banks can eliminate most of the manual work required and use humans to manage only the alerts and exceptions.
By extracting and structuring critical data from all supporting documents, these platforms minimise operational and compliance risk and simplify validation processes. And because a bespoke platform can be hosted on-premises or in a private cloud, concerns about data sovereignty are addressed.
An advanced cross-border trade payment platform could allow a bank to run a standard payment check with no anomalies through the system in a matter of minutes, with human intervention required only when issues are flagged.
Because the system itself can be scaled to handle more volume, we can run higher volumes of payments in shorter periods of time with fewer human resources in the loop.
This means banks can scale cost-effectively, enhance efficiency and compliance, and dramatically reduce the time taken to process payments.
For customers, it offers not just greater efficiency and convenience − it may also save them money, as they could negotiate discounts for expedited payment.
In future, banks could potentially also use AI to predict exchange rate fluctuations, to determine the optimal date to make payment and potentially further reduce the costs associated with cross-border trade and payments.
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