Webb Fontaine is driving efficiency in trade and customs

Interview with Ara Shamirzayan, Chief Technology Officer of Webb Fontaine

In an exclusive interview with Opera News, Ara Shamirzayan, Chief Technology Officer of Webb Fontaine, spoke about how the company is utilising AI to support governments as a leading provider of trade facilitation solutions backed by cutting-edge technology.

Shamirzayan emphasised their major accomplishments in AI, the role of their Research & Development Centres, and offered insights into the future of AI applications within the company.

How is Webb Fontaine implementing AI to support governments improve, facilitate, and streamline their processes?

International trade involves a lot of stakeholders and throughout the process a lot of data is produced and exchanged. Traditionally, the process includes a lot of manual data processing and validation. By using ML and AI, Webb Fontaine products automates significant majority of data processing and validation, resulting in faster processing time, data accuracy and transparency.

For example, the next release of our Licensing module which is the core module of our Single Window package, we are able to extract information from scanned documents and pre-populate the data in electronic documents instead of manual capture which is prone to error.

In another case, in our Webb Valuation product, which is our main product for providing valuation and classification for pre-arrival declarations, using AI techniques, we automatically classify the HS Codes based on the commercial descriptions provided. The auto-classification has reduced the processing and approval time of the documents by 80%.

What are your notable achievements on AI?

By using the latest AI techniques in our products, we have been able to have following main achievements:

• We have achieved over 60% automation in data processing and validation where there is over 98% confidence in accuracy of AI prediction, essentially cutting the time spend on manual verifications by half.

• These automations result in cost savings for both private sector and the government by reducing the processing time and error rates.

• Trade documents are complex ones and working with them requires specific skillsets. Applications for processing trade documents are also complex ones.

• By using AI, we have been able to provide very simple user interfaces where users do not need to have deep specialised knowledge.

• Our users simply talk to our products and our products can have human-like interaction with our users.

Tell us about your Research & Development Centres and how you want to drive innovation through these centres.

Our Research and Development centers are located in the Philippines, France and Armenia. With over 150 dedicated teams of engineers, Webb Fontaine holds one of the biggest in-house Research and Development teams in the industry.

Our Research and Development teams are core component of our Product Development Life Cycle and of our Product Development teams are in constant contact with our clients, understanding their needs and future plans and applying the latest technologies to provide solutions for their needs.

We use Java-based technologies for developing our products. Being platform independent, Java-based technologies allow great deal of flexibility for deploying our products into platform of choice of our clients.

While majority of governments are still using on-prem solutions, we use cloud-native technologies which makes it possible for us to deploy our solutions in cloud without any problem.

Our dedicated AI/ML team makes it possible for us to always be in the forefront of applying the latest solutions to our products.

We also have recently applied LLM to our products which makes it possible for our users to interact with our product as if they are interacting with a human.

How is Webb Fontaine implementing its technology including AI in transforming the Trade and Customs landscape across Africa? Which projects are successful and worth mentioning?

We have recently completed implementation of Webb Risk Intelligence, our AI-powered Risk engine, for Egypt. Using our risk engine, we see big improvements in identifying fraud and efficient risk management of the Egyptian customs.

In Benin, by using AI-based auto-classification in our Valuation and Classification solution, we can auto-classify more than half of the transactions which has significant increase in processing time and also accuracy in assessment which results in big increase in government’s revenue. We have witness more than 20% increase in revenues as result of our services.

Throughout international trade several countries are involved (e.g. country of export, country of transit, country of import, etc.). Webb Fontaine operates in several countries in Africa which makes it possible to digitally connect the countries involved in trade together. For example, we can automatically create all the documentation required for an importation to Nigeria from goods exported from Benin, which means that the accuracy of data is increase and the time required to fill import declarations is drastically reduced.

Tell us about large language models (LLMs)and full integration across systems.

Recent progresses in LLMs provide huge opportunity for further enhancing our products.

We are able to achieve functionalities which we very hard to do 2-3 years ago. By integrating LLMs in our products, we are further bridging the gap between humans and software products.

Prior to introduction of LLMs in our products, our clients needed to have specific technical expertise and training to be able to perform certain functionalities. For example, to configure the taxation engine in our older version, the administrator should undergo training to learn the specific scripting language used in our application for creating different taxation rules.

With integration of the LLMs, we have a simple User Interface where our user can just tell the system what they want to achieve as if they are asking someone to do that task for them and our system performs that task. Thus, the system has become much more user friendly.

How do you ensure seamless automation in Ports, Customs and all Ministries related to trade?

There are several stakeholders involved in trade operations in Ports, Customs and Ministries. Each stakeholder is usually in different level digitalisation (some are fully digitalised and some might be even totally relying on manual processes without any digital solution).

Our products are modular where each product is built out of several modules. When implementing our solutions we are able to seamlessly interface with existing solutions and also replace manual processes with our solutions.

If a stakeholder has already a digital solution, there is no need to replace their solution and we only establish a system-to-system integration.

On the other hand, if the system is manual, by using our solution, we are achieving complete digitalisation. Hence, reaching complete automation of the processes.

What does the future hold for Webb Fontaine and AI utilisation? 

Being equipped with strong and innovative R&D, we are confident that we will continue providing more advanced products as AI capabilities grow.

We remain committed to provide best AI-integrated trade facilitation products in the world. We believe that with the advancement of AI, the world is not very far from a day where international trade is conducted completely automatically, and we are committed to be a key player in realisation of such a world.

Originally published in Opera News on 18 October 2024.

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About Webb Fontaine

Webb Fontaine is revolutionising international trade by empowering governments and communities with technology powered by AI. We offer comprehensive solutions across the trade spectrum, ranging from risk management to customs systems, single window, and beyond. Webb Fontaine is headquartered in Dubai, UAE with a presence across Europe, Middle East, South America, Asia and Africa.