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Even in the digital age, paper documents are ubiquitous — especially in the banking industry. While cumbersome, they are too deeply embedded in core operations to be eliminated. So, banks that find the most efficient and hassle-free way to deal with documents gain a competitive advantage.
That’s why banks are increasingly turning to automation. In addition to automating document-heavy processes — customer onboarding, negative news search, screening alert review, etc. — today’s cutting-edge tools learn from the data involved in these processes and apply that knowledge to train artificial intelligence (AI) with machine learning in what’s known as intelligent document processing (IDP).
Everest Group defines IDP as “any software product or solution that captures data from documents (e.g., email, text, PDF, and scanned documents), categorizes, and extracts relevant data for further processing using AI technologies.”
In its annual industry assessment known as the PEAK Matrix®, Everest analysts designate IDP “Leaders” — describing these vendors as “continu[ing] to create new opportunities for the IDP market by investing in R&D to enhance AI capabilities and pre-packaged out-of-the-box solutions.” In 2021, for the third year in a row, WorkFusion was named a Leader in IDP. We appreciate this recognition, and in this article, we want to highlight five ways WorkFusion’s solution enables banks to improve their document-heavy workflows.
Clearly, for employees, updated and integrated technology is essential. Employees prefer more seamless digital experiences as more work is performed remotely.
Streamlined document handling
To onboard new customers, banks must collect and process many documents of different types. Inevitably, teams spend a great deal of time gathering, analyzing, and extracting information from these documents and entering data into customer lifecycle management (CLM) systems. This tedious routine creates several challenges that impede customer service and customer growth. So, what’s the alternative?
With the pre-trained ML models and pre-built integrations in WorkFusion’s Intelligent Automation solution for CLM, one of our banking customers has created a new operating model and better user experience for the whole KYC team. Benefits include dramatically reduced document processing time (10% of submitted documents can be processed straight through without the need for human supervision or intervention), improved data accuracy, and shorter lead times for improved customer service.
Learn more about our solution for document handling in our Use Case Navigator.
Automated identity verification
Essential for customer due diligence, identity verification involves multiple data-intensive and highly regulated steps. While the importance of all these steps is clear, the process can be tedious for bank employees and customers.
With Intelligent Automation, one of our customers managed to achieve a 100% auditable identity verification process. WorkFusion’s dedicated solution accelerates the verification process by automatically extracting relevant data from various documents. The bank achieves better customer satisfaction, higher accuracy, and lower total costs.
Enhanced adverse media monitoring
Negative news about a banking client may indicate a potential risk of financial crime. Thus, negative news search is a critical activity to which banks devote a significant amount of staff time. Analysts face several key challenges in their searches: unstructured data, high risk of missing a “needle in a haystack,” low tolerance for errors, etc.
WorkFusion’s Intelligent Automation helps reduce manual work in adverse media monitoring by up to 70% and enables teams to check larger numbers of reports with greater precision. With WorkFusion, Scotiabank, the third-largest bank in Canada, has automated its adverse media monitoring and achieved savings of $4.2 million within the first 6 months.
Just look at Standard Bank, another WorkFusion customer. They have deployed Intelligent Automation to automate over 100 processes, dramatically decreasing account opening times, reducing risk, and allowing employees to focus on delivering superior customer service.
Name screening alert review for sanctions and politically exposed persons
Another essential component of KYC is name verification. The main challenge is that bank employees receive thousands of alerts daily. Most of these are false positives that must be checked and resolved manually. This is time-consuming, even demoralizing, work. Imagine a 70% reduction of this manual effort, an 80% decrease in false-positive alerts, and a completely automatic full audit trail: WorkFusion’s pre-trained ML bots regularly achieve these results, quickly and easily determining whether an alert is a genuine match or a false positive.
Seamless payment screening alert disposition
Like negative news and name screening alerts, 98% of payment alerts are typically false. Think of the millions of payments global banks process every year, and the time it takes to check each alert manually.
One of our customers realized it was unnecessary, even wasteful, for their employees to spend so much time and effort handling all these alerts. This bank implemented WorkFusion’s pre-trained ML bots to check payment messages of all types for several common scenarios — resulting in a 70% reduction in manual work and a 75% reduction in false positives.
No matter the industry, document processing is a critical component of back-office functions. As our customers know, effectively and efficiently handling documents will not only give you an advantage over competitors but will transform your business. If you’d like to learn more about WorkFusion’s IDP solutions, you are always welcome to contact us with questions or to request a demo.