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The combination of razor-thin margins, heightened compliance and security requirements, and ever-increasing customer service requirements are putting a strain on the document processing operations of financial services organisations such as banks, insurers, mortgage lenders and brokerage firms.

Complicating matters is the explosion of information that must be managed efficiently and securely - growing at an average of 35 percent annually for banks, according to a 2014 study by Aberdeen Group - and the increasingly diverse channels through which paper and electronic documents arrive.

Fifty six percent of U.S businesses polled in a recent InfoTrends study said they expect an increase in the amount of paper and e-documents in their business processes over the next 12 to 24 months. As a result, financial services organisations that rely on manual processes in their document workflows are reaching their breaking point.

This article aims to explain how intelligent document recognition brings substantial improvements to financial process workflows, and provides real-world examples of how financial companies achieve these benefits. An intelligent document recognition solution performs three operational functions:

Classification: Intelligent document recognition interprets content and patterns on documents to automatically classify paper and electronic documents into different document types, and determine the beginning and end of a document. For instance, intelligent document recognition can apply optical character recognition (OCR) technology to an entire document to capture information and compare it with data stored in lookup tables about known document types. The technology can also classify documents based on images contained on a document such as a logo, or based on text such as a description of a field ("invoice amount"). Compared to old template- based solutions for document classification, this content and pattern-based approach to document classification is easier to setup and manage, and delivers better results. Knowing that the document is a lending form, customer correspondence or a survey report equates to higher levels of data extraction accuracy in the next step.

Extraction: Once a document is classified, intelligent document recognition extracts important data from anywhere on the document, to start a business process and/ or to populate a database in a downstream application such as loan origination, ERP or remittance processing. This increases accuracy by identifying patterns and data formats. For instance, if the term 'loan number' is identified, intelligent document recognition will automatically search nearby and extract the loan numbers. Rules for data extraction can be flexibly configured based on unique business requirements.

Release: Intelligent document recognition solutions export data and images (such as searchable PDFs) to any content management, workflow, repository or downstream application (including financial applications, customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning systems). Exported information is immediately available for use, enabling workers to quickly take action.

Together, these capabilities automate the manual steps found in a typical document processing environment.

Intelligent document recognition solutions are also content-driven, meaning they capture content from any paper or electronic document, from any source, including:

• Centralised batch scanning
• Remote browser-based capture
• Ad-hoc desktop capture
• Emails
• Fax servers
• Networked multi-function peripheral (MFP) capture
• Mobile devices

This is a critical capability considering that financial services organisations receive paper and electronic documents from more channels than ever, and analysts predict that document volumes will continue to grow.

FIVE TRANSFORMATIVE BENEFITS
There are five ways that intelligent document recognition transforms financial services applications:

1. Reduced operational expense:
Intelligent document recognition solutions significantly reduce the paper handling and manual data entry common in many financial services applications. For instance, one of the top 100 banks in the U.S. achieved its anticipated productivity improvements within only six months of implementing an intelligent document recognition solution.

The bank's old document imaging system required a full-time equivalent (FTE) employee to do nothing but scan consumer loan documents for 9 hours each business day. With the intelligent document recognition solution, it now takes the same individual only 3 hours daily to scan all of the bank's consumer, as well as commercial, loan documents. Additionally the bank reduced the labour required to prep documents and generate slip sheets from 1.75 FTEs to a fraction of an FTE.

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