The ore is worth millions. The bank pays the paper.
A bulk cargo under a letter of credit is paid against documents — and the bank checks them with a ruthlessness no spellchecker ever matched: exact strings, exact dates, exact arithmetic. This is one (fictional) shipment from the Edition 001 universe — Redstone Resources loading iron-ore fines for Jinhai Steel, US$14.8M against four documents. Present the clean set, then break it five different ways and see which of the eight checks catches it, what the bank would do, and how to cure it — before presentation, when it's still cheap.
Honest-AI note. The eight compliance checks are deterministic code running live — strings, dates and arithmetic, exactly as banks apply strict compliance. The AI layer, labelled where it appears: in production an LLM extracts the fields from document scans and drafts the cure memo per discrepancy; here the memos were drafted by Claude at build time. One authentic wrinkle powers the maths: ore is weighed wet (wmt) but priced dry (dmt) — the invoice must agree with the certificate's moisture, to the cent.
01Check before the bank checks
Every discrepancy found at your own desk costs minutes; the same discrepancy found at the bank's desk costs a fee, days of float on eight figures, and negotiating leverage. The checklist isn't bureaucracy — it's the cheapest money in trade finance.
02Strings and arithmetic, not vibes
“Redstone Resources Ltd” is not “Redstone Resources Pty Ltd”, and the bank will not care that everyone knows who's meant. Strict compliance is a machine-checkable standard — which is exactly why code should check it first.
03Some failures are phone calls
A typo is reissued in an hour. A late B/L is a fact — no paper cures it; only the buyer's waiver does. Knowing which failures are desk-work and which are relationship-work is the operator's judgment — the memo drafts it, the human makes the call (this is where Edition 001's ledger pays off).
Plain-language key (LC, strict compliance, B/L, wmt/dmt, discrepancy, waiver)
- Letter of credit (LC)
- The buyer's bank promises to pay the seller — if and only if the presented documents comply exactly.
- Strict compliance
- The documents must match the LC's terms literally — names, dates, amounts. Close enough isn't.
- Bill of lading (B/L)
- The ship's receipt and title document. "Full set 3/3" means all three originals; "clean" means no damage remarks.
- wmt / dmt
- Wet vs dry metric tonnes. Ore is weighed wet, priced dry: dry = wet × (1 − moisture).
- Discrepancy
- Any mismatch the bank finds. It may refuse to pay until cured or waived by the buyer.
- Waiver
- The buyer telling their bank "pay anyway" — usually the product of a good relationship and a fast phone call.