Joon Kim, managing director, Global Head of Trade Finance and Cash Management Platform, Global Payments & Trade at BNY—a Trade Finance global award winner—discusses how digital transformation drives speed, compliance, and agility in global trade.
Global Finance: BNY recently migrated its Treasury and Trade services onto a new Platform Operating Model. How has this improved onboarding and document processing speeds for trade finance clients?
Joon Kim: BNY’s Platform Operating Model centralizes ownership with cross-functional squads, standardizes tooling, and automates document intake and compliance checks, reducing handoffs and accelerating end-to-end workflows. As a result, onboarding now takes days instead of weeks and trade finance documents are processed faster, with greater accuracy and full auditability. This approach enables rapid issue resolution and clear accountability across the engineering, product, and operations teams. Recently, a client was onboarded in record time through close collaboration among these teams, a hallmark of the model. By applying agile practices, it also prioritizes the delivery backlog more effectively.
GF: It’s been said that KYC and AML are the “death of trade finance” for smaller players. With BNY’s new Eliza/Gemini integration, is vetting new trade corriders taking less time, or is the technology primarily helping you manage rising regulation?
Kim: Yes, BNY implemented a sanctions disposition agent called SIERA in third quarter 2025, with human in-the-loop, to help partially automate the disposition of sanctions alerts, reduce manual work, and scale even at peak volumes. Since launch, manual touchpoints in sanctions have decreased by approximately 24% and turnaround times for our clients have improved by around 35% while strengthening sanctions compliance with high accuracy and strong rationale capture in dispositions. Eliza also streamlines data intake and standardizes workflows, which can modestly reduce vetting time in well-defined trade corridors, though external verifications and cross-border legal reviews still drive much of the timeline. The biggest gains today are consistency, transparency, and auditability across the process. Other areas of focus using technology include enhancing our ongoing monitoring of transactions in flight, including changes in the ownership structures of the counterparties involved.
GF: With the rise of near-shoring and friend-shoring, has there been a significant shift in trade corridors (e.g., South-South trade)? How is BNY adjusting its correspondent banking network to support these new routes?
Kim: Our objective is to be the premier trade finance partner for financial institutions across the globe. We understand that trade corridors are constantly shifting, illustrated by the tariff-driven rebalancing from Asia-Pacific to North America and the growth of South-to-South routes. In response, we are adjusting our coverage and capabilities to meet clients where they do business. By leveraging our strategic global footprint, we provide agile, dependable trade finance solutions that support our clients’ trade finance needs and supply chains regardless of how markets and corridors evolve.
GF: The adoption of T+1 settlement by the the US has increased pressure on liquidity. How has this impacted BNY’s working capital management for international trade clients facing multi-day shipping lags?
Kim: While faster settlement—particularly for payables and receivables financing—supports working capital efficiency, settlement speed is only part of the broader working capital cycle. Dynamic discounting, intraday positions, and deposit yield optimization are equally important for corporate treasuries as they seek to enhance liquidity and overall returns.
GF: Given BNY’s leadership in digital assets and stablecoins, do you envision a future in which trade finance instruments are settled in real time via tokenized cash, rather than traditional T+2 cycles?
Kim: It’s plausible that trade finance instruments could settle in near-real-time using tokenized cash, but broad adoption will depend on the maturity of regulated on-chain money, legal frameworks, and interoperability across jurisdictions. In the near term, progress will likely occur in limited, well-defined use cases and permissioned networks where participants and rules are clearly established. The potential benefits include faster cash flows, reduced settlement risk, and improved transparency across the process. Key challenges remain around cross-border compliance, operational readiness, and standardizing digital trade documents. Overall, the direction is promising, but timelines will be determined by regulatory alignment and industry adoption.
