Fintech company TradeSun has hired Chris Lewis as executive director.

Based in San Francisco, he will report to Nigel Hook, CEO, and will be responsible for all sales, marketing and platform implementations.

Speaking to GTR about his new position, Lewis says: “I’ve been involved with trade finance since 1982 and we have finally reached a level of technology that could lead to the full digitisation and automation of this business in the not-too-distant future. I look forward to TradeSun being an integral part of this process.”

Lewis joins from Wells Fargo, where he spent six years as head of global trade services, managing the bank’s trade business through increased cross-sell, product enhancement, sales and distribution.

Prior to that, Lewis spent over 20 years at HSBC where he was most recently head of trade and supply chain for North America. Before that, he led the bank’s trade and supply chain operations in Greater China.

Tradesun was launched as a company last year by the founder of Data Skill, a technology firm that has been running since 1981, initially providing a contract system for the US department of defence.

The company has launched an AI-driven solution to digitise and automate the processing of trade documents. The platform combines optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP) technology to read and extract information from a wide variety, type and quality of complex trade documents in order to scan for suspicious activity and regulatory infractions.