Apart from government agencies, employees working in banks & other financial institutions have to adhere to the enormous amount of rules & regulations when it comes to managing information.

Information also includes the confidential data that is maintained on the bank’s servers, as well as documents that are submitted by customers & businesses that have some kind of working relationship with the bank.

Document ‘Identification’ & ‘Maintenance’ – A growing challenge for Banks & other Financial Institutions

As per a report, Identity of Client (bank accounts opened with names similar to other established business entities, false identification documents, etc.) is one of the most important factors that can make or break the reputation of a bank. Employees have to deal with a significant amount of paperwork, though financial institutions are trying their best in order to keep the costs of maintaining these paper documents under control. Take the case of maintaining the documents submitted by a new customer at the time of opening a new bank account. There is a significant amount of data from the account opening form that needs to be fed to the back-end system and any error caused by the  manual entry can result in loss of business, indirectly impacting the ‘client satisfaction index’. As banks have to adhere to a lot of regulatory and compliance standards, maintaining documentation for compliance is also a big task. Irrespective of the nature of the documents e.g. account opening forms, loan processing forms, KYC (Know Your Customer), mortgage forms, etc.; they need to be maintained in a manner where less effort is spent on ‘Document Identification’. If the bank falters in any of these tasks, it would hamper the productivity of the staff.

Document ‘Standards’ & ‘Retrieval’: Unstructured & non-uniform formats followed by different departments impacting ‘customer experience’

Irrespective of the size of the bank, the overall structure of any banking organization is considered to be highly complex as there are a number of departments providing different services to their esteemed customers. Hence, each department might be having its own format of document descriptions, document folder structure, metadata, etc. which makes the task of accessing/editing/searching ‘common’ documents across departments a tedious task. Inadequate content management can make retrieval of important documents highly complex, thereby impacting the pace at which the other follow-on activities are executed. These delays can result in a sub-optimal customer experience which can negatively impact the bank’s brand & business. The tasks like document processing, extracting customer information from the form, matching customer signature to prevent frauds, etc. are mundane in nature, yet very critical in nature; so they need to be performed with utmost precision. However, due to the mundane nature of these tasks, they are more prone to manual errors. Though the problems mentioned so far are different in nature, there is a common pattern in each of them – bank representatives have to review a number of documents and in most scenarios, he/she has to manually enter the details at the back-end. How can banks get out of this ‘document chaos’ and keep their employees motivated to provide excellent services to their customers?

Intelligent information Management (IIM) – Solving the ‘documentation crisis’ faced by the BFSI sector

Intelligent information Management (IIM) platform from AIQoD can be instrumental in automating critical activities mentioned below

• Capture – Gather input from tools like scanners, ERP, spreadsheets, etc.
• Processing – Match, structure, and figure out ‘any’ discrepancy in the data
• Routing – Insertion of data in the ERP or any other backend/accounting system
• Retrieval – Retrieve or query data from ERP or any other backend/accounting system

The platform leverages technologies like Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Image Processing, etc. in order to bring intelligence to a routine, yet critical job like ‘Documentation’. Highly accurate Handwriting Recognition feature in the platform can be used for signature verification. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) feature in cognizance with mobile capture & recognition feature identifies and extracts text from documents and images, thereby eliminating chances of error in processing and management. Irrespective of the department, employees within the bank can use a common automated workflow for input, indexing, search, and processing of documents so that they can focus on activities that require creative intelligence, rather than spending their time in scouting for documents. Incorporation of IIM in a task like ‘documentation’ can have far-fetched benefits, some of which are listed below

• Centralized Access to documents
• Faster retrieval & processing of documents
• Compliance with the required financial regulations
• Enhanced accuracy of documents
• Boost in employee’s morale and productivity

Conclusion

RPA for ‘documentation identification & maintenance’ for BFSI sector has multi-fold benefits and can help in providing enhanced customer experience, engaging employees with important tasks and saving overhead costs.