Intelligent Document Processing in Finance - Uncomplicating, Accelerating and Streamlining your organization

Intelligent Document Processing is the avengers-unite moment of OCR, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. It involves processing and capturing data from various sources and managing them on a comprehensive platform. Financial systems conceptualized decades ago couldn't have imagined a future that included technology like IDP, but here we are. 

In this blog, we'll discuss why, as a financial organization, you should move beyond manual data entry or template-based OCR for document processing and upgrade to high-tech IDP financial services.   

Before getting into it, if you need to brush up facts about Intelligent Document Processing and how it's different from Optical Character Recognition, here are quick references:-

Overview of Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) and its Benefits 

What is the difference between IDP and OCR?

So, let's jump right into it:-

Intelligent Document Processing use-cases in financial sector

Let's look at the most prominent reasons IDP is making a splash:-

1. How is IDP making banking easier?

• With IDP, banks are processing credit applications, forms, and income verification documents. With the heavy volume of data that banks process daily, it wouldn't be feasible to do this manually.
•  All this data collected above will be stored for the customer's benefit.
•  It helps banks process heavy data to predict the future trends of the economy. 
• With all this storage of data, Fraud detection becomes more effortless. 
• Risk Mitigation and cost reduction is another advantage of this gathered data.  

2. Lending services love IDP's adaptability 

• Keeping track of lent small loans to Small and Midsize businesses and mortgages has become more accessible. Here is how:
• Since the pandemic began in March 2020, banks have seen a massive jump in forbearance, meaning too many customers started falling behind on repayments. They resulted in a pile-up of documents, workload, and frustration in the banks. Intelligent document processing quickly took in all that data and took the load off of bank staff's shoulders. And that's all thanks to the wonders of AI and Machine learning.  
  

3. IDP is easing customers through its productivity

Another industry where paperwork has always been a hurdle is the Insurance Industry. Here's how IDP facilitates:

Claim analysis

‍Through claim classification, IDP can direct claims to the right-end user for a better turnaround time and precision.

Medical Claims

‍The healthcare industry is heavy on paperwork, especially when it comes to insurance claims. Through automating document processing unstructured data can be assessed while also providing accessibility and privacy to patients and their data.

Commercial Underwriting

‍The job of several employees is to process thousands of pages of paperwork that can take up to weeks if done manually. Through scanning, classification, routing, and analysis, IDP has improved turnaround time, employee efficiency, data accuracy, and customer satisfaction.

4. Make account paying effortless

Intelligent Document Processing allows:-

• Extraction, authentication, and classification of data from invoices.
• Fully-automated verification process with human intervention is necessary only in exceptional matters.
• Speeding up manual processing by ten times.
• Integrations with smart software to protect data via embedded payments and encryption services

Difference between intelligent document processing and manual document processing? 

Manual document processing isn't just a task that requires hard labor; it also requires spending something more precious than money – time. All that time spent gathering client information through manual forms, photocopies, and simple OCR technologies can be spent on other research and development technologies. 

Manual document processing relies on careful management, care, and uploading of physical papers. Therefore those depending on manual processing are also gambling on the safety and security of those documents. A small office fire or the negligence of an employee could cause many customers hundreds or thousands of dollars.   

IDP succeeds where humans fail

The number of documents and tedious procedures one must go through to get something done in the financial world is not a secret. Moreover, even a tiny error like manual entering of an extra 0 in any numerical figures can cause severe losses to the customer and the company. For instance, imagine the mess that an insurance company would end up in if $30 becomes $300 because of a minor clerical error. That's where IDP can help save your life. Prevention is better than cure! 

1. Cost and time-efficiency

Data processing takes up a lot of workforce and working hours of an employee. On the other hand, IDP can reduce labor costs as technology replaces your staffing. With an IDP solution implemented, even remaining employees can be free of manual work and focus on other high-value tasks.

2. IDP grows alongside your business

Scalability is one area where even high-tech OCR technologies are lacking. For instance, if changes in insurance policies or budget announcements cause a company to change its forms, IDP systems can quickly adapt to this change. Without IDP, this change would require throwing away old papers and giving orders for thousands of articles to be reprinted manually. Don't forget the customers who will line up the financial institutions to submit new documents. All of this and more can be avoided with simple IDP adaptations. 

Thanks to Artificial Intelligence software, some serious security to your documents can be added, too, with the help of voice recognition and response.

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So, how should you choose an intelligent document processing solution for your finance institute?

Choosing an automated document processing solution is the first step towards updating your institution. IDPs' ability to sort through different documents with high precision makes it a processing solution worth the hype.  

A document processing solution should recognize and review all the other file formats used in your institution. IDP can keep up with various file formats such as PDF, Docx, jpg, png, and tiff. Its capabilities of differentiating between document types such as contracts, applications, notices, bank statements, etc., are all things to watch for. 

1. Is it replacing humans adequately?

Replacing manual human effort doesn't mean that an AI or intelligent document processing system can, without error, take humans' place. It means that it can seamlessly direct to a human when any missing fields or exceptional cases are detected.

2. Look for maximum device compatibility. 

Overall the solution you choose should accurately catch data from a variety of input devices. After this, the data will be tagged and categorized. This makes documents easy to find for everyone through a search engine which will conserve employee time and make the entire process highly productive. With employees saving some extra time, they could utilize it for other essential tasks beneficial for the institutions' development.

When are you making the switch?

Thanks to advanced AI technologies, we are no longer reliant on static technology to process our data. OCR was only able to process formatted data, keeping specific rules in mind. In other words, there was hardly anything automated about it. Traditional OCR is utterly out of the picture regarding unstructured or handwritten data. This made OCR impractical when it came to scaling large. 

On the other hand, IDP is a technology with an AI-based system that constantly keeps learning on its own. IDP is easily able to recognize the difference between context and content. For example, it is smart enough to say that "one dollar" spelled out is the same as "$1" written this way. IDP is now capable of going through data as if it were human. When it comes to speed, IDP can read, process, collect and analyze data in a way that is now much faster than humans.