Norway’s Maritime & Merchant Bank (M&M Bank) is tapping into artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up its ship-finance operations.

The Henning Oldendorff-backed lender is teaming up with law firm Simonsen Vogt Wiig (SVW) and law tech company Hunit to test the use of smart legal contract (SLC) loan facility agreements.

This is a first for shipping through the use of distributed ledger technology and is expected to deliver reduced operational costs and improved risk management for banks.