ABBYY Helps Financial Institutions Quickly Transform Incoming Documents Into Actionable Data

In a Nutshell: Banks and financial institutions must continually streamline inefficiencies and digitize legacy customer-service workflows. Intelligent document automation services from ABBYY help many achieve their workflow efficiency goals. ABBYY solutions use intelligent data capture and extraction to expedite process automation, manage business fluctuations, simplify customer interactions, and retain customer and application data for compliance and fraud detection. The secure ABBYY platform helps banks enhance business effectiveness and connect more readily with customers while improving competitiveness in a dynamic market environment.

There was a time when OCR (optical character recognition) stood on its own as cutting-edge technology. For the past 30 years, ABBYY has played a leading role in transforming OCR from a product to a feature in the much larger ecosystem of intelligent document processing.

ABBYY created its OCR software, FineReader, in 1993. Now ABBYY helps more than 10,000 businesses, including market-leading financial services firms and Fortune 500 companies, process incoming physical and digital documents and gain insights from the data — insights that can impact effectiveness, profitability, customer experience, and ultimately profitability.

ABBYY’s Vantage platform uses artificial intelligence and pre-trained skills to serve businesses of all sizes. Its Proof of Identity solution streamlines digital customer interactions using the same mobile capture and intelligent document processing technology.

Every business sector where large-scale document handling is imperative seeks to streamline and automate those essential but costly and error-prone processes. That’s especially true in financial services, where human teams traditionally process large amounts of incoming information. ABBYY mitigates the high cost and inflexibility of conventional document processing in many ways.

“We evolved from transforming text on paper into using data to automate and accelerate decision making, whether it’s onboarding, account opening, benefits and claims, or anything else where content is essential,” said Bruce Orcutt, ABBYY’s SVP of Product Marketing. “Financial services is the largest market we address.”

ABBYY helps financial firms streamline and automate daily operations, including account openings and credit card and loan applications. And wherever ABBYY technology touches proprietary business information, it establishes an audit trail for compliance and fraud detection.

“We’re giving businesses a chance to engage their customers where they are and onboard them with confidence,” Orcutt said. “In most of our environments, we can save customers around 50% of transaction costs.”

The Vantage platform is ABBYY’s flagship Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solution for the digital workforce. Through Vantage, IDP automatically captures, extracts, and processes data in structured, semi-structured, and unstructured business documents encompassing practically any process in any industry.

In financial services, processes include KYC compliance, mortgage loan and credit application processing, fraud prevention and risk management, trade finance, and many other transactional scenarios. Vantage is flexible enough to handle customer interactions and back-office responsibilities now and in the future.

Vantage uses artificial intelligence (AI) to process documents as part of business hyperautomation strategies. Key to its efficiency as an AI tool is that it’s well-educated and capable of learning more.

Education comes from pre-trained AI skills that understand documents like humans, with 90% straight-through processing and more than 99% accuracy. Skills, connectors, and other assets that enhance and extend Vantage reside as modules in the ABBYY Marketplace, ready for drag-and-drop installation.

“They can just license it, and it’s all set to go, working out of the box,” Orcutt said. “They’re now able to process all this content in real time where they don’t have to do any setup or training on their own.”

Pre-trained document skills that save development time and gain quicker ROI include invoices, purchase orders, receipts, W-2 forms, utility bills, and insurance claims. 

That’s not all — Vantage allows “citizen developers” to design new skills for the platform using an easy no-code skill designer. New skills published by citizen developers make Vantage capable of addressing all structured and unstructured documents.

Even large financial institutions with extensive legacy infrastructure can use it because it plugs directly into robotic process automation tools now prevalent in the enterprise. “We work within those tools to better integrate into legacy platforms,” Orcutt said.

ABBYY’s diverse product/solution set enables various inroads into its services for customers. For example, enterprise customers use ABBYY’s Timeline product for process intelligence, discovering patterns and insights leading to better customer experiences and new operational efficiencies.

Proof of Identity encapsulates ABBYY’s approach to instant identity proofing and affirmation. Financial businesses have helped drive increased demand for this market-leading mobile capture and intelligent document processing technology in the wake of the social and business transformations of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Let’s face it — if customers have anything to say about it, you’re not going to meet face to face,” Orcutt said. “You’re going to need to see their ID and use other technologies, including liveness detection, to make sure they are who they say they are.”

That’s the essence of Proof of Identity, which governs onboarding, account opening, claims, and enrollment processes to handle any ID cards, photos, and supporting documents customers may submit.

Proof of Identity goes further than many competing products by affirming identity instead of merely validating ID. Facial matching, liveness detection, and trailing document processing combine to reduce customer pain points and get them to their destination.

Proof of Identity works wherever customers want to work, including on mobile. Applicants can start onboarding on a laptop and move to their phone, where automatic image-capture technology processes IDs, selfies, utility bills, bank statements, and other forms of validation with glare and focus detection and the ability to detect incorrect documents and incomplete framing.

Orcutt said Proof of Identity not only helps customers, it also helps financial businesses retain employees by reducing the struggle and unpleasantness of serving customers with less seamless verification technology.

“It allows them to focus on more important problems,” Orcutt said. “They’re happier because they have happier customers.”

OCR is integral to these processes within Vantage, Proof of Identity, and other ABBYY solutions. ABBYY also integrates its intelligent process automation and process intelligence solutions in leading resource planning and content management platforms and works with alliance partners to add value.

The result is hyperautomation at scale. Uber isn’t a bank, but it typifies enterprise concerns concerning customer acquisition and ongoing financial relationships conducted entirely online, Orcutt said.

“You’re never going to meet someone at Uber to validate who you are, but there’s a lot of data you need to provide them to open that account,” he said. “We help automate that and make it easier across the business spectrum.”

Given the stakes, it should not surprise that ABBYY has a DNA-level commitment to security and compliance. It has the requisite ISO certifications for a SaaS (software as a service) platform and is SOC 2 compliant for security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Moreover, many ABBYY customers deploy third-party auditors and reviewers, so there’s double protection.

“They may love the technology and accuracy, but if there’s any risk on the security side, they cannot implement,” Orcutt said. “It’s very much a top-of-mind issue.”

The ABBYY Help Center centralizes customer support and provides access to ABBYY’s customer community, knowledge base, and company news. Platform analytics shed light on performance and efficiency, while community contributions help customers maximize the value they receive from their relationship with ABBYY.

In the constant race to stay ahead of the competition and innovate in process automation and customer service, more financial services companies are choosing ABBYY for an industry-leading edge.

“The market changes daily, and the system adapts,” Orcutt said. “We’re adapting and enhancing the accuracy and straight-through processing that customers require.”