How to automate banking processes involving unstructured documents

Early Attempts at Automation in Commercial & Retail Banking

Commercial and retail banks for years have been trying to automate document-intensive processes, but with limited success. The reason: because most processes deal with documents that contain unstructured content.

Early bank process automation attempts relied on systems based on keywords, rules, or templates, all of which fall short when confronted with unstructured content. Such approaches would have to account for every possible document type a bank may come across – an unlikely scenario given the range of documents and content involved in many processes.

Consider customer onboarding. It requires all sorts of documents to get a new customer set up correctly, including the bank’s own application forms, perhaps tax returns, statements from other institutions, credit reports and the like. You would have to spend millions paying consultants to come up with templates or writing rules for every possible document type you may encounter. Even if you succeeded for a time, as soon as a new document type came along, or an existing document format changed, the automation would break down. Money wasted.

The shortcomings of OCR and RPA

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.)

Intelligent Document Processing for Commercial and Retail Banking

As implemented by Indico Data, intelligent document processing technology is fundamentally different from OCR, RPA and templated approaches because it can understand document context much like a human does. That’s because the Indico Unstructured Data Platform is based on a model that incorporates some 500 million labeled data points, enough to enable it to understand human language and the context of a document.

Building an effective automation model requires having a large set of data to “train” on. It’s that trove of data that brings bring intelligence to any artificial intelligence solution. But even the commercial or retail bank would be hard-pressed to come up with that much data and effectively train its own models.

Indico uses an AI technology known as transfer learning to create custom models that can tackle virtually any downstream task – including customer onboarding, loan processing and other common banking processes. The end result is it takes a relatively small number of documents to train the model – usually just a few dozen. What’s more, you don’t need data scientists to make it all work. Rather, business professionals on the front lines train the automation model – those who know the processes best. (For a deeper dive on this point, check out our Intelligent Document Processing page.)

How IDP Complements RPA

While intelligent document processing often works well on its own, some commercial and retail banking processes can benefit from the combination of IDP and robotic process automation.

RPA is effective at automating deterministic business processes that involve highly structured data. So, it’s useful for automating repetitive, labor-intensive tasks, often with greater accuracy than humans – because software robots don’t get tired. IDP, meanwhile, is able to automate processes that involve unstructured data, making it complementary to RPA.

One example of how RPA and AI can work together in banking is automating lockbox processing, which involves matching payments, in the form of checks, to invoices. An IDP tool is used to “read” invoices and checks, extract relevant data and translate it to a structured format, then hand it off to an RPA tool for input to a downstream processing system.

Banking Process Automation: Key Benefits

In this age of digital transformation, it’s imperative that banks take steps to achieve efficiencies wherever they can. Indico’s intelligent document processing platform is one solution that can help in that effort while delivering significant benefits, including:

• Capacity expansion: Automation increases employee productivity up to 4x, enabling banks to increase revenue with existing headcount.
• Cycle time improvements: Automating manual processes enables bank employees to get work done faster, even while increasing accuracy.
• Increase efficiency: Taking mundane tasks off an employee’s plate frees up time for more rewarding work that’s also more valuable for the institution.
• Knowledge capture: Automation requires banks to codify processes that may have been performed for years with no formal agreement on how it should be done. In the process, banks are often able to streamline processes and make them more efficient.
• Compete more effectively: Automation makes banks more competitive, taking a page out of the book of the nimblest fintech startups.

Automation Augments but Doesn’t Replace Humans

A common misconception about automation is that it will displace lots of human from their jobs. In our experience, that is not the case. Rather, automation is used to augment employees, relieving them of the most repetitive, boring aspects of their jobs so they can focus on more important matters.

A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute supports this notion. It said only about 5 percent of occupations “could be fully automated by currently demonstrated technologies.” The more likely scenario is that portions of jobs will be automated – about 30 percent of the activities in 60 percent of all occupations, according to McKinsey.

In the commercial and retail banking world, that means your employees will have more time to dedicate to strategic efforts that can give you a competitive edge.