Scaling productivity with document understanding technologies

Peter Ortmanns, Sales Director at Asia Pacific, IRIS Products & Technologies

I.R.I.S. - A Canon Company, lays down how financial institutions can reduce manual work and focus on their core business. By Peter Ortmanns, Sales Director at Asia Pacific, IRIS Products & Technologies

Banks tackle lots of administrative tasks every single day. Opening new accounts and processing loan applications and credit cards require repetitive manual tasks and document processing.

Intelligent Document Processing for Banks

The topic of automatic processing of checks and transfers related to document recognition, optical/intelligent character recognition and data extraction was very prominent in the banking sector 25 years ago. After 5-10 years and getting rid of technical limitations for document classification and index capture, digital processing of customer onboarding as well as credit applications came up. AI technologies played an essential role in the extension of use cases. In the meantime, it is even possible to add use cases of automated wealth management, crime prevention for trade-based money laundering, and robotic examination for the letter of credit files.

The automatic analysis of the letter of credit letter, for example, is based solely on very tedious document analysis. The Uniform Customs and Practice for Documentary Credits or UCP 600 published by the International Chamber of Commerce requires numerous document types to be distinguished. They are checked for completeness, date of deadlines, and validation of numerous data for correctness and integrity in multiple respects and detail.

A bank‘s motivation to introduce such software is quite simple⁠—it’s all about reducing PROCESS COSTS, saving TIME, mitigating RISKS, and instigating BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT. For a bank, it is a challenge to scale the purely manual-driven letter of credit business because the process is resource and knowledge-intensive. Usually, there are four cases of output per day and consultant. The staff needs to have a very solid knowledge of UCP 600 and other international trade regulations and yes, they need to have very good skills in document examination. On top of that, the issuing bank needs to safeguard the service-level agreement for five days after the presentation of the documents by the vendor.

With regards to the letter of credit market itself, we can recognise that it is heavily under pressure especially due to the pandemic and its impact on trade and the supply chain. Hence, increasing the market share in the letter of credit market isn’t easy for a bank, when sticking to manual processing. 

In the era of Industry 4.0 in a factory robot-assisted manufacturing is based on the automation of repetitive tasks with regard to a certain workpiece. In offices, digital transformations deal with the workpiece “information”. But with regards to productivity improvement both are managed by the same principles—what today’s banks require is a kind of process logistics that ensures that the right workpiece is processed using the right tools, in the right quantity and quality, at the right time, in the right place, in the right way, and transferred to the right successor. 

Digital Mailroom and Digital Workplace

The Digital Workplace enables banks and other financial institutions to concentrate on their core business and value creation processes by automating repetitive activities in the background. This is particularly seen in the Digital Mailroom where the automation of documents and information inbound contributes substantially to business development. Companies are being supported to:

• Reduce manual errors, processing time, and operating costs;
• Increase productivity and transparency;
• Improve traceability, accessibility, and auditability; and
• Implement hybrid ways of working: in the office, at home and on the road.

These can also be applied in other industries that need automated processing of commercial letters such as offers, delivery bills, orders, and invoices. The automated separation, sorting, and typing of incoming documents supports intelligent case management in HR departments, law firms, clinics or claims management at insurance companies through to patent departments of multinational corporations. Such software is also used in national elections, citizen services in public administration, and even with transport and logistics service providers.

Every keystroke counts!

I.R.I.S. - A Canon Company has been successfully meeting these challenges of digital transformation for 35 years. Over 40 million users worldwide use our intelligent document processing technologies daily. The software scans documents or imports documents from different sources like mobile capture, typifies them, and extracts data automatically. The offering combines the most advanced technologies, including AI-driven text and index recognition and automatic data integrity checks, machine learning-based document classification and, in terms of robotic process automation, learning features that consider on runtime the semantical context of data entered by a user.

Every click and keystroke counts and your next step on your digital transformation path is just one email away. Consider IRIS, consider it done.