Rosemont, Illinois, 22 – 23 October ⏤ LiquidX was a premier sponsor and was represented by David Berse, Managing Director, Head of FI, North America, at the 8th annual BAFT Regional Bank Conference (RBC).
The BAFT RBC is an exclusive event for regional banks (with assets of USD$250B or less). There are no geographic restrictions, so you can attend from any regional bank, anywhere in the world.
The RBC is specifically dedicated to regional bankers and serves as a unique hub for networking, thought-provoking discussion, and collaboration.
David spoke on the following panel: “How Regional Banks Are Expanding Services and Growing Profitability.”
On the panel:
Moderator
Oliver Pringle, AVP, Global Trade Services Sales Principal, Fifth Third Bank
Speakers:
David Berse, Managing Director, Head of FI – North America, LiquidX
Cindy Leopold, SVP, Operations Group Manager, Global Trade Services, The Huntington National Bank
Let’s see what the roundup was.
How Regional Banks Are Expanding Services and Growing Profitability
Looking to grow your bank’s business and deepen customer relationships?
Discover how regional banks are unlocking new revenue streams by partnering with specialized product vendors. In this session, we helped demonstrate how regional banks can identify opportunities to expand supply chain services, leading to increased revenue from top clients and opening the door to new customer relationships.
Learn how these enhanced services also sparked growth in the traditional trade business, creating a powerful ripple effect across the organization.
For regional banks navigating today’s turbulent financial landscape, becoming more transparent, robust, and secure means leveraging technology to manage risk more effectively while controlling costs. Here’s how modern FinTech SaaS platforms deliver on that promise:
1. Strengthen Risk Management With AI-Powered Analysis
Regional banks face the same regulatory pressures as their larger counterparts, but typically with more constrained budgets. (Except for Basel III: regional banks don’t face quite as stringent rules).
AI-powered risk management tools help predict counterparty risk, detect suspicious patterns, and optimize credit distribution strategies without requiring massive teams.
Risk management and compliance represent a significant operational burden. According to EY research, large trade finance banks spend between $25 million and $42 million annually on risk, compliance, sanctions, and anti-money laundering (AML) tasks alone.
For regional banks, AI and automated digital tools can dramatically reduce manual workload and cut risk management costs while maintaining — or even improving — the quality of oversight.
2. Deploy AI for Fraud Detection and Prevention
Financial crime remains a persistent threat across the banking sector. EY estimates that approximately $1 trillion in illicit proceeds flows through global trade channels annually within the $9.1 trillion trade finance industry.
This makes Know Your Customer (KYC) and AML protocols non-negotiable for every transaction. By automating routine fraud-detection checks and deploying AI-powered safeguards, regional banks can speed up and streamline these processes, thereby reducing their vulnerability to human error.
3. Leverage Predictive Analytics for Smarter Portfolio Management
Regional banks need clear visibility into their exposure across borrowers, industries, and transaction types. Predictive analytics help forecast demand, identify suitable buyers for loan participations, and flag concentration risk before it becomes problematic.
If your portfolio shows heavy concentration in short-term consumer goods financing, analytics can trigger alerts recommending diversification. These tools also track transaction history to prevent duplicate sales of the same assets and provide automated rebalancing recommendations based on predefined risk thresholds.
4. Accelerate Processing With Digital Document Workflows
Trade finance and commercial lending involve substantial paperwork — invoices, certificates of origin, customs documents, and financial statements. AI-driven optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP) can extract and verify data from these documents in a fraction of the time it takes manual review.
This digitization capability accelerates transaction processing, improves accuracy, and forms the foundation for further automation in credit decisioning and portfolio management.
5. Gain Strategic Insights From Market Intelligence
AI-powered platforms can aggregate and analyze market data, including regional trade flows, pricing trends, industry performance, and regulatory developments.
For regional banks, this translates into actionable intelligence about emerging opportunities within their geographic footprint and early warnings about potential risks.
These insights support more strategic portfolio diversification, help identify underserved market segments, and enable regional banks to compete more effectively by making data-driven decisions about where to deploy capital.
- AI For More Robust Safeguards
AI integration within SCF and other trade finance systems is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s mission-critical.
As our CRO, Dominic Capolongo, said in Finance Derivative:
“The key advantage lies in AI’s pattern recognition capabilities. Rather than relying on fixed rules, machine learning models can identify complex relationships between different data elements.”
“When a buyer truncates an invoice reference or applies an unexpected discount, AI can still identify the correct match by recognising patterns in the remaining data points. This capability proves invaluable when reconciling transactions affected by tariff-related adjustments or partial payments.”
Continuing with this theme, about how AI can further support and enhance the supply chain finance sector. In another article, Dominic said in AI in Business:
“Sharper, more sudden fluctuations are being sparked not by the things we know are coming, but by the latest news headlines – particularly around the rapidly changing U.S. trade policy – and this unpredictability is triggering knee-jerk reactions across the market.”
“While market volatility shows no sign of settling, AI, specifically ML, does offer a solution in terms of how financial institutions handle the chaos.”
Why Regional Banks Have an Innovation Advantage
The good news is that regional banks can be more agile when it comes to innovation. It doesn’t take as long to adopt and integrate new technologies, so if you’re looking ahead into 2026, now is the time to start putting plans into motion.
What else has LiquidX done in 2025?
Sibos is one of several events that LiquidX has attended in 2025, and in many cases, we’ve spoken on panels and sponsored.
Take a look at some of the highlights from a very busy year for our team:
How Digital Advancements are Reshaping Customer Experience in International Banking, following LiquidX’s attendance at the 2025 Bankers Association for Finance and Trade (BAFT) Global Annual Meeting (GAM) in May.
LiquidX at ITFA: Innovations in Trade Finance Tech. Miami, Florida, 4 ⏤ 6 June, 2025 ⏤ LiquidX was delighted to attend and be a gold sponsor at the ITFA Americas (AMRC) 28th Conference.
LiquidX at GTR UK 2025: How will AI transform trade finance?, London, England, UK, June 12, 2025.
LiquidX at the 13th Annual USC Global Supply Chain Summit, Marriott Long Beach, Downtown, CA, August 14-15, 2025.
In September, in partnership with Trade Treasury Payments (TTP), we hosted a Rooftop Networking Event in New York City.
Trade Treasury Payments (TTP)’s Carter Hoffman spoke to several industry leaders throughout the night, including our very own Dominic Capolongo.
Take a look at the highlight video from TTP.
LiquidX at Sibos Frankfurt 2025, in Partnership with Broadridge, Messe Frankfurt, Germany, 29 September ⏤ 2 October.
One of the great things about the trade finance sector is how many events there are throughout the year. This serves to bring people together, face-to-face, sharing expertise, insights, connecting, and starting new working relationships.
LiquidX will continue to take part in events, whether that’s hosting them, talking on panels, sponsoring, or both, like we did at the BAFT RBC 2025.
Want to shape the future of trade finance? Share your views with 1000s of other professionals in our sector?
Below is a survey you can take part in, with a whole load of benefits you need to know about.
Share Your Views & Expertise for our eBook: “State of Trade Finance 2026”
For the first time since we launched LiquidX in 2016, we are initiating a global survey of trade finance experts. That’s right, we want to know your thoughts, views, and expert opinions on the overall state of trade finance.
Once the survey is complete, and enough responses gathered ⏤ we expect by October ⏤ we will start compiling our exclusive eBook, which we’ll launch in January 2026: “State of Trade Finance 2026: Past Learnings, Forward Thinking.”
Take 5 minutes to complete our survey, and we’ll send you the finished eBook before it’s published. Your quotes will be amplified via our PR, social media, and email marketing channels.
What do survey participants get?
Because we’re asking for a few minutes of your time, we feel it’s only right to give you something in return.
Because we’re asking for a few minutes of your time, we feel it’s only right to give you something in return.
Here is what you’ll get:
✅ An exclusive Trade Finance Industry Briefing: How to Navigate, Mitigate Risk, and Accelerate Growth Opportunities in 2025. In this you will:
✅ Learn how to access the $2.5 trillion untapped trade finance gap in emerging markets
✅ Discover why supply chain finance grew 26% CAGR from 2017-2023 despite global headwinds
✅ Understand how to monetize $6.9 trillion in corporate cash reserves sitting idle
✅ Master Basel III implementation without disrupting your trade finance operations
✅ Turn tariff chaos and supply chain disruptions into competitive advantages
✅ Leverage AI-powered risk management while competitors still use manual processes
✅ You’ll gain access to the exclusive eBook before it’s published in January: “State of Trade Finance 2026: Past Learnings, Forward Thinking.”
✅ And unless you choose to remain anonymous (which everyone is free to do), we will amplify your hot takes, opinions, and expertise via our PR, social media, and email marketing channels.
Join the conversation that’s defining the future of trade finance – your expertise is exactly what the industry needs to navigate unprecedented change.
Here’s another great reason to work with us! In 2024, Global Business & Finance Magazine awarded LiquidX with three awards for the second year in a row:
- Best Digital Solutions For Global Trade, United States 2025
- Best Technology Vendor Of The Year, United States 2025
- Best Fintech For Trade, United States 2025
Corporations, banks, and asset managers: To request a demo of our trade finance distribution solutions, click here.