As trade finance continues to digitize at a rapid pace, compliance is expanding beyond the ever-changing regulatory checks and due diligence. For example, banks looking to adopt trade finance software must ensure they are meeting the current standards in accessibility, digital resilience, and document compliance. For practitioners, understanding these areas is essential, not just for audit readiness, but for ensuring smooth, secure, and efficient operations.

Here’s a quick high-level summary of key considerations you need to know right now!

Accessibility Matters – WCAG 2.2
The power of cloud solutions lies in its scalability and reach – but to truly help bridge the trade finance gap – that reach must extend to everyone, including people with disabilities.

Under the European Accessibility Act, banks must ensure their internal trade finance portals and customer interfaces are fully accessible to users with visual, cognitive, or motor impairments. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2) come into force by the end of June 2025 and are an important update in accessibility standards with which all digital platforms must now comply. In practice, these ensure software providers, and their banking customers are paying particular attention to features such as keyboard navigation and focus indicators, authentication, help functions and repeated forms.  Adopting WCAG 2.2 standards reduces operational friction, improves user adoption, and future-proofs platforms against growing legal and compliance expectations around digital inclusion. But it’s not just about compliance for compliance’s sake, it’s about inclusion, innovation and impact. Accessible software ensures that no one is left behind.

Operational Resilience – Enter DORA
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), introduced by the EU, came into force in January 2025, and sets forth new requirements for fintech-related risk management including protecting systems from cyber threats, ensuring business continuity, and maintaining data integrity to minimize operational disruptions.

For trade finance banks, this means you must ensure your solutions can demonstrate resilience against cyber threats, downtime, and operational failures. You must demand stronger oversight from your vendor around incident reporting, risk assessments and digital continuity planning. DORA is not just an IT concern, it directly affects how trade transactions are executed and safeguarded and given that a fair proportion of banks have missed the January deadline, there is no time to loose. Contact us now, we can help.

Document Compliance – Powered by AI
Trade transactions still hinge on the successful exchange and processing of multiple documents between multiple parties, during which accuracy, transparency and regulatory conformity are critical. Whether it’s bank guarantees, letters of credit (LCs), bills of lading and more, digital trade finance platforms must go above and beyond.

While there is no single, universal industry regulation specifically mandating how trade-related sanction screening or document checking must be performed, regulators, international bodies, and industry standards all impose expectations that make these checks essential.

For example, sanction screening is enforced locally by national regulators (e.g. OFAC in the U.S., HM Treasury in the UK, EU Council, UN), so trade banks are legally required to screen parties and goods involved in trade transactions against sanctions lists. Failure to do so can result in heavy fines, reputational damage, or even criminal penalties.

Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter-Terrorism Financing (CFT) laws globally require customer due diligence (CDD) and transaction monitoring. As trade finance is high-risk, so regulators expect heightened scrutiny, especially for complex or high-value documents.

Automated document checks and verification are key for completeness, consistency and compliance. Alignment with ICC rules – which are not regulations but globally respected standards – include UCP 600 (Uniform Customs and Practice for Documentary Credits) and ISBP 821 (International Standard Banking Practice). These define how documents should be examined according to local customs regulations, real-time sanction screening, embargoes, and dual-use goods controls for consistency, authenticity, and accuracy.

With the power of artificial intelligence (AI) now securely embedded in so many trade-related platforms, automating these checks has never been easier. Platforms like Surecomp’s RIVO™ that integrates AI for automated guarantee text checking and validation can help reduce errors, speed up turnaround times, and reduce compliance risk in a document-heavy workflow.

It’s open-API architecture also enables seamless connectivity to third party fintech partners like Semsoft’s LESTR platform providing sanction screening, vessel tracking, document checking and trade-based money laundering (TBML) detection, or Cleareye.ai which uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract and classify data from trade documents, achieving 90% accuracy.

In Summary:
Regulators don’t always say how to do compliance well, but they will certainly hold you responsible if you don’t do it well. To avoid penalties, costly disputes, customer relations turning sour or delayed shipments, we strongly recommend that all trade finance banks carefully consider accessibility, DORA and automated document checking. Compliance is more than just a back-office consideration, it can give you a competitive edge. It’s front and center in how deals are structured, executed, and monitored. By choosing software that aligns with WCAG 2.2, meets DORA standards, and supports robust trade document compliance, you’re not only protecting your institution, but you are also building a more agile, inclusive, and trustworthy trade operation.