Other early attempts at commercial and retail banking automation included optical character recognition (OCR). OCR is machine learning technology that can be used to convert documents such as PDFs into a machine-readable format. That’s useful, but it still leaves you dealing with templates to actually extract pertinent information, and all the issues that presents.
Robotic process automation in banking is another possibility but it, too, has severe limitations. RPA is great at automating processes that involve the exact same steps each time. Say, for instance, a bank data entry clerk entered the exact same keystrokes in the same order time after time into a mortgage processing system. That would be a process that’s ripe for automation using RPA.
But that’s not at all how bank processes tend to work, especially those dealing with unstructured content, which is most of them. With unstructured content, an employee has to read the document and make judgment calls about it, including what data to extract. (RPA can, however, complement IDP in some retail and commercial banking automation solutions, as we discuss briefly
below and in detail
here.)