Case Study — Aug. 27, 2025
Strengthening Trade Compliance with S&P Global Market Intelligence AI-Powered Risk Detection
Customer Pain Points
The current workflow of the bank was hindered by time spent investigating and clearing false positives. Frequently, teams were sidetracked in their work and having to invest additional resource into managing a reactive compliance programme. Furthermore, gaps existed in certain screening checks for cargo compliance and the price reporting of goods, often leading to an overreliance on free, open-source datasets which were manually orientated tasks to conduct and contained many different touchpoints which compounded overall inefficiencies.
The Solution
The ability to progress with a strategy to enhance and transform the existing digital compliance processes of the bank was imperative. Enhancements to compliance oversight in the areas of maritime sanctions, export controls and price reporting were top of the agenda. Extensive datasets were made accessible by S&P Global Market Intelligence through web-based platforms and API endpoints, along with on the ground post-sales support for the adoption and optimization of these tools.
Introduction
A major South African bank has successfully implemented S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Trade Compliance Secure solution, marking a significant leap forward in its digital compliance transformation. This cutting-edge platform harnesses big data and artificial intelligence to deliver real-time insights and ensure robust regulatory compliance across all facets of trade operations and financial crime investigation. This implementation empowers the bank to proactively manage trade-based risk, streamline operations and ensure regulatory alignment across global markets.
The trade compliance team at this major international bank are responsible for managing documentation and customer information right from the start, ensuring that any risk found within an individual transaction can be captured accurately and efficiently.
As regulatory pressure continues to grow for financial institutions involved in the facilitation of international trade, the challenge to banks when seeking to manage and subsequently capture instances of fraud and sanctions evasion rises. Therefore, the need for a robust and compliant solution which can maintain ongoing compliance in a precise and efficient manner was a major requirement for the bank.
Pain Points
The core task of the trade operations team is to screen names, companies, vessels, goods descriptions, ports and goods values on trade documents, capturing any sanctioned or money laundering activity in the process.
The trade operations team’s key requirements and needs covered the following:
- A single application that could allow them to screen and document multiple risk entities – forgoing the need to access numerous sources.
- Identify cargo compliance risk by searching on the full ‘goods description’.
- Minimize false positives when identifying export-controlled goods.
- In-depth vessel tracking and activity management system that conforms to the latest OFAC shipping advisories.
- Detailed price reporting system from official trade statistic sources covering the full HS code schema − Provision of a full auditing tool that captures all screened elements to support regulatory responsibilities.
- Integration of the full suite of Market Intelligence’s trade compliance datasets into the bank’s main compliance platform.
Solutions
S&P Global Market Intelligence provides a risk management solution using customs price data, vessel activity and movements tracking and export-controlled goods identification. The utilisation of these datasets allows the trade operations team to perform the following:
- Understand Shipping Risk – Extensive coverage of sanctioned vessels and owners, fully complimented with a deep understanding of AIS outages, ship-to-ship transfers in high-risk areas and vessel identification spoofing.
- Identify Export-Controlled Goods – Powerful database of 520,000+ items covering brand and product names, refined with real-life bill of lading goods descriptions for greater accuracy.
- Evaluate Over-and-Under Price Invoicing – Ability to view timely unit price information, derived from official government statistic sources, on goods across the full HS Code schema, from t-shirts to washing machines.
- View Import and Export Data – 154 reporters representing 98% of global coverage for merchandise trade organised by HS Code, helping users zoom into monthly data for country-focused trade volumes, values, and unit prices.
Benefits
The trade operations and sanctions investigation team benefit from the many features of the Market Intelligence Trade Compliance Secure solution. The ability to identify and minimize risk, plug gaps in the current screening process and adhere to new regulatory guidelines, offers the bank certainty and assurance when handling customer transactions.
- Operational Efficiency – Significantly reduced the time spent on false positives and manual investigations, freeing up resources for higher-value tasks.
- Regulatory Confidence – Align closely with OFAC, FinCEN, BIS, and other global regulatory frameworks, ensuring the bank remains ahead of evolving compliance mandates.
- Client Trust & Retention – Embedding compliance into the core of trade operations, and in due course enhancing transparency and trust with clients and regulators.
The bank has deployed Market Intelligence’s Trade Compliance Secure user-interface across all branches of the organisation, together with the integration of content directly into the bank’s back-office platform via API feed. This strategic partnership with S&P Global Market Intelligence underscores the bank’s commitment to innovation, resilience, and leadership in secure, compliant trade finance.