Dutch bank ABN Amro has rolled out new technology to monitor transactions and flag suspicious activity across its global trade finance operations.

On Tuesday, Holland’s third largest bank announced it had gone live with Norweigan software vendor CBA’s IBAS transaction due diligence software for trade finance transaction monitoring and compliance.

The move comes after ABN Amro's chief executive Robert Swaak, who will not be returning for a second term, said earlier this month that the bank needs to focus on its efforts in "data capabilities, digitalisation and regulation".

The bank says that the new technology allows it to immediately detect unusual behaviour, helping it meet its aim to combat financial crime and ensure "full compliance with national and international regulation."

It also forms part of its wider plans to automate and digitalise its trade financial processes.

“There are lots of new requirements and demands on the trade finance industry for which we have relied on our close partnership with CBA in evolving IBAS to meet the constant changes and complexity inherent in this area of our business,” said Frans Westdorp, product owner trade finance, ABN Amro. “By automatically monitoring all trade finance transactions for consistency against the historical information available for each customer and counterparty within IBAS, we can quickly flag up anything suspicious that requires investigation and show a complete audit trail for each transaction every step of the way.”

ABN Amro says that the new technology will enable it to keep up with Dutch regulatory requirements, as well as all relevant international regulations in order to mitigate against fraud and suspicious activity and meet the requirements of all internal and external auditors.

The rollout builds on the bank's existing partnership with CBA, after the organisations signed a five-year agreement in 2023.

Earlier this month, ABN Amro reported net profit of €642 million and 10.8 per cent return on equity in its second quarter, which it said was driven by improved net interest income and net impairment releases.

"The second quarter marked another strong quarter for ABN Amro, both with regard to our financial results and also in delivering better services and products, and supporting clients in their sustainability transition," said the bank's outgoing chief executive at the time.

ABN Amro also announced in its financial results that it had launched an in-house version of ChatGPT for all of its staff.

Last year, the bank's chief commercial officer, personal & business banking revealed that the Dutch bank was scaling up ChatGPT in its call centres.

Annerie Vreugdenhil – who is also a member of the executive board at the bank – told delegates at Money 2020 Europe that the organisation had been trialling ChatGPT across 20 contact centre agents.

Traditionally, agents at the bank have taken notes during a customer call to produce a summary afterwards. The bank is now using ChatGPT to create these summaries, with the agents simply checking they are accurate afterwards.

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