Major French Banking Group Deploys Web-Based Capture From Kodak Alaris To Reduce Costs, Improve Efficiency And Ensure Regulatory Compliance

A French banking group and its subsidiaries are realizing significant business benefits thanks to an advanced information capture solution from Kodak Alaris. The solution is enabling the bank to seamlessly process physical and digital documents more efficiently, delivering cost and time savings, improving customer satisfaction, and reducing risk around data security and non-compliance with regulatory requirements.

Challenge

Every day, the bank processes thousands of documents which originate from multiple sites and internal sources and are received in many different formats. The legacy business process saw each document routed to a central system where data was classified and extracted. The information was then sent to the appropriate subsidiary or team for review prior to informing customers of the bank’s decision regarding their applications.

One of the biggest frustrations was the time spent on document preparation, and the large number of exceptions, for example documents which were unreadable due to poor image quality which needed to be handled manually. The bank needed to remove bottlenecks associated with staff manually classifying and extracting data before it could be returned to the central system to be processed.

Manual intervention cost time and money. With automation levels much lower than desired, the bank’s goal was to reduce financial overhead in terms of labour, as well as delays in processing applications which negatively impacted customer satisfaction. But the overriding objective was to reduce risk. In instances where data bypassed the central process, there was no enforcement of data handling rules, which raised concerns over regulatory compliance and could result in fines.

Solution

Kodak Alaris delivered a solution designed to address all the bank’s challenges: improving image quality and enabling documents to be scanned faster; reducing preparation time with technology designed to sort documents more efficiently; and automating customer onboarding and other business processes with machine learning.

Kodak Alaris provided the bank with one Kodak i5850s production scanner to manage the digitisation of documents at their head office, as well as two Kodak i4650 Scanners which were installed across a number of subsidiary locations.

Info Input Solution, a web-based and mobile capture application designed to work seamlessly with scanners from Kodak Alaris, was also supplied as part of the solution. Info Input enables faster capture and importantly, provides real-time access to scanned information for all staff regardless of location. This technology has enabled the bank to capture and index data from both digital files and physical documents – including email from 500 mailboxes – much faster than before.

With automation a key requirement in terms of reducing the time spent on processing individual pieces of information and the associated cost, Kodak Alaris recommended Ephesoft Transact. This advanced document capture software features patented machine learning algorithms designed to significantly increase classification and data extraction accuracy.

Benefits

Kodak Alaris’ fully customised capture solution has enabled the bank to seamlessly process physical and digital information more efficiently. A reduction in manual processes means more work can be completed in less time which has delivered significant cost and time savings, and improved customer satisfaction.

Scanners from Kodak Alaris deliver high-quality imaging and superior OCR rates while advanced paper handling and sorting features serve to minimise exceptions.

Challenging, complex documents can now be processed much faster and without the need for manual intervention. Ephesoft Transact employs multiple classification methodologies to better identify documents and can customise data extraction for the best results, thus facilitating faster decision-making. The ability to automatically extract key data from documents, combined with higher automation levels and machine learning technology for indexing and classification, which enables document capture to improve over time, has reduced the time to process documents. This in turn is expected to reduce overall response times by at least 30% which has positively impacted customer satisfaction levels.

Automating document workflows and seamlessly integrating advanced document classification and extraction capabilities within the bank’s existing business applications has resulted in increased efficiencies, reduced operating costs and outstanding ROI.

In addition, with significantly fewer exceptions, all data is routed through the central business process. This ensures business rules around data security such as anonymising personal data can be enforced, which helps the bank meet regulatory requirements and reduce risk of punitive fines for non-compliance.

“Kodak Alaris was the only technology provider that could offer an innovative and scalable solution based on machine learning,” said Cyril Condamines, Country Sales Manager, Kodak Alaris France. “The bank can now quickly and accurately classify high volumes of documents while integrating emails into the process as well. We were also the only company that could deliver a proof of concept (POC) by the deadline and in fact, our one-week turnaround far exceeded the bank’s expectations. All of the other vendors required two months to deliver a comparable solution.”