Skip to Main Content
Resources
Financial Services
Healthcare
Company News
Services
Innovation & Design
Technology Strategy and Implementation
Systems Integration 
API Management
AI, Analytics & Automation
Business Process Improvement
Enterprise Automation
Intelligent Document Processing
Low Code/No Code Development
Generative AI
Industries
Financial Services
Digital Banking
Core Banking
Composable Banking
Consumer-Driven Banking & Open Finance
Lending
Commercial Lending
Residential Lending
Payments
FinTech
Banking As a Service
Healthcare
Data Interoperability
About
Who We Are
Partners
Careers
Back
Work with us
Financial Services
Healthcare
Company News
Innovation & Design
Systems Integration 
API Management
Business Process Improvement
Enterprise Automation
Intelligent Document Processing
Low Code/No Code Development
Generative AI
Digital Banking
Core Banking
Composable Banking
Consumer-Driven Banking & Open Finance
Lending
Commercial Lending
Residential Lending
Payments
FinTech
Banking As a Service
Data Interoperability
Who We Are
Partners
Careers
Work with us

Benefits of Intelligent Document Processing

Back
Financial Services | Banking Automation | Digital Banking | IDP | Lending Technology

Benefits of Intelligent Document Processing

January 20, 2023
Benefits of IDP

If you are reading this, chances are that you are exploring intelligent document processing (IDP) systems for your business.

Many businesses are curious about this document automation process because, just like you, they may have heard about how it simplifies complex document layouts, captures data and organizes it for a seamless workflow.

In this article, we will explore:

  • What Is Intelligent Document Processing?
  • How Intelligent Document Processing works
  • Benefits of Intelligent Document Processing

What Is Intelligent Document Processing?

Intelligent document processing uses Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), computer vision, and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) to automate data extraction from complex semi-structured and unstructured documents. This technology helps you categorize the extract data into a meaningful format that is easier for people or a system to comprehend. A popular use case for intelligent document processing is mortgage origination and decisioning, where applications can run into hundreds of pages.

Read more on how Intelligent Document Processing helps financial services organizations.

How Does Intelligent Document Processing Work?

IDP uses deep-learning AI technology to scan complex data, extract it and organize it into predefined categories. The best part is that this technology can be trained in up to 190 languages.

One of the best ways to understand how document processing works is to look into a few use cases first. Here are multiple ways in which IDP helps organizations from various industries to automate their data.

IDP for Human Resources

One of the popular intelligent document processing use cases is human resources. This paper-intensive industry has already transitioned to data automation by:

  1. Screening resumes and capturing the right skill sets that match a job description. This has helped HR teams avoid going through resumes manually and narrow down on candidates who are fit to take up the role, hassle-free.
  2. Keeping all the employee data in one place. Earlier, HR teams were forced to manage hundreds of thousands of files for new and existing employees. Not only was it hard to find specific data quickly, but it was hard to comprehend at times. But with IDP, it is easier to update and extract the employee data when need be.
  3. Simplifying the employee onboarding process by capturing employee information based on the forms filled in by them.

IDP for Mortgage Processing

Another data heavy use case you can refer to is mortgage processing. Given how vast the industry is, you can only imagine the number of documents that accumulate at every stage of the mortgage process. Let’s see how IDP simplifies document accumulation and data extraction for this industry:

  1. IDP is capable of processing high-volume mortgage data and identifying possible risks one may face during the process. With IDP, mortgage officers can identify the cause for rejection and inform approvers about these potential risks.
  2. Validating documents is time consuming. However, IDP helps you validate the data from documents with a button and offers you insights on whether to move ahead with the mortgage or not.
  3. You can also audit each mortgage application with IDP and that too without human intervention. It can be time consuming to audit documents for a mortgage even when you have a professional helping you out with the process. With IDP, you can save time and also check the authenticity of each document.

Top 7 Benefits of Intelligent Document Processing

  1. Increases Employee Productivity

One of the benefits of using IDP is its ability to increase employee productivity. Intelligent document processing helps employees free up their time that they spend on doing repetitive tasks such as data entry and record management. Lesser time spent on repetitive tasks helps increase their productivity.

  1. Helps Reduce Manual Work

IDP is also known for reducing manual work as it enables extraction of data from a document,  an image, sound, or even a video using its AI technology. What’s more, the data extracted is then transformed into text, thereby helping employees reduce manual work on such tasks. It uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) that understands the content and converts that data into text.

  1. Automates Classification of Documents

Once the data is converted to text, it is classified into different categories, without the need for human intervention. This helps your organization with data collection and streamlining the document management process with minimal errors.

  1. Enables the Processing of Large Volumes of Documents

Another benefit of using IDP is processing large volumes of documents in one go. While humans take time to extract data from each document, the same isn’t true in the case of IDP. Unlike humans, a document processor can extract data from multiple documents simultaneously. You can tackle a giant database and avoid spending capital on a data entry team.

  1. Improves Data Accuracy

Humans are prone to make errors when feeding data to a database, especially when there are a large number of documents. This may hamper the overall authenticity of the database and may leave managers questioning its accuracy.

Thankfully, the same isn’t true in the case of AI and ML-based IDP technology. It is capable of entering the data accurately in the database and retrieving the same data with speed when its users need it on an urgent basis. In short, an automated document processor can extract accurate data and eliminate mistakes with an accuracy of more than 90%.

  1. Increases User and Customer Satisfaction

Intelligent Document Processing is capable of providing users with optimal responsiveness through the life cycle of work to be performed. With IDP, you can process evidentiary documents, extract the right keywords from a data set in less time. What’s more, the automated process can use keywords to route emails to the right department for faster throughput from start to finish. This helps speed up the response time between receiving an origination request to approving it, from a claim initiation to notification of completion, etc. Documents are no longer the bottleneck.

  1. Offers Data Security

When documents are managed manually or in disparate data systems, there is always a possibility of a data breach. But with IDP, documents can be kept in a secure, centralized location. This enables businesses to be more compliant with data protection regulations. In other words, you can make sure that the data saved never gets misused by anyone.

Maximize the Benefits of Intelligent Document Processing

Benefits such as these (and others discussed in the article above), will help you identify various reasons why a data extraction processes like Intelligent Document Processing are essential for your business. Once you decide to opt for intelligent document processing, it’s time to look for the right implementation partner.

Why Choose Blanc Labs’ Intelligent Document Processing?

Blanc Labs believes in driving improved operational efficiency and better business outcomes.

Blanc Labs’s IDP solution can:

  • Automate workflows for document collection, digitization and analysis
  • Replace manual effort through intelligent data capture
  • Connect with third party data providers for analysis and insights
  • Analyze document data, provide status alerts, and flag fraudulent entries
  • Secure documents in a drop box
  • Deploy on premises, in the cloud or as a hybrid model

We hope that learning about these benefits will help you arrive at a decision faster and invest in the best document processing solution in the market.

Top Use Cases for Banking Automation

Back
Financial Services | AI | Digital Banking | Digital Transformation | Enterprise Automation

Top Use Cases for Banking Automation

January 16, 2023
Top Use Cases for Banking Automation

Did you know that the World Bank uses Banking Automation including robotic process automation (RPA) for many of its functions? That’s how powerful it is.

Modern businesses rely on automation to reduce costs and improve efficiency, but how can banks use automation? In this article, we explain the most common use cases of banking automation.

What is Banking Automation?

Banking automation involves handing over repetitive business processes in financial institutions like banks and credit unions to technologies like robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML).

Why Banks Need Intelligent Automation

As a banking professional, you know that a good chunk of your daily tasks is repetitive and mundane. Banking automation eliminates the need for manual work, freeing up your time for tasks that require critical thinking.

Here are seven reasons why banks needs intelligent automation:

  1. Better Customer Experience
  2. Automated KYC
  3. Faster Mortgage Application Processing
  4. Accurate Report Generation
  5. Anti-Money Laundering Prevention
  6. Audits and Compliance
  7. Faster Decision Making

Below we dive deeper into banking automation use cases so you can get a closer look at how automation can transform your workflow.

1. Customer Experience 

A robust Customer Experience has never been more important. As the world moves online, you’ll need to re-engineer your Customer Experience to make it friction free, faster and more efficient.

Consider a customer’s first experience with the customer onboarding process. If this isn’t a painless experience, you risk turning away a customer in the first interaction.

Sure, you might need to invest some money to improve the customer experience and make it seamless and efficient, but the potential ROI is excellent. Think about it. Automation will eliminate much of the manual and low-value in-person interaction, saving your sales reps plenty of time to focus on running effective sales campaigns.

Automating processes reduce the potential for errors, allowing you to onboard customers faster. Automation also reduces costs because it eliminates the manual labor and paperwork associated with customer onboarding.

Moreover, your customers will be able to use their accounts faster, which improves customer experience. As a McKinsey report explains:

“Automation and artificial intelligence, already an important part of consumer banking, will penetrate operations far more deeply in the coming years, delivering benefits not only for a bank’s cost structure, but for its customers.”

2. KYC

Most banks perform KYC (Know Your Customer) by manually verifying customer details. The problem? Manual verification can take plenty of hours.

The KYC process doesn’t end at verification. You must manage KYC documents for a long time to comply with regulatory requirements. Using automation in banking operations can help free up the hours you spend on manual verification.

Moreover, automation also eliminates the risk of human error. By eliminating room for error, automation ensures improved customer experience, increased quality assurance, and the number of cases processed each month, according to a McKinsey study.

3. Mortgage Application Processing

Mortgage application processing involves plenty of paperwork. Manually checking details on each document is time-consuming and leaves room for error. On the other hand, intelligent document processing (IDP) helps streamline document management.

Remember those desks full of paperwork? That’s a thing of the past. Modern banks use IDP to manage documents digitally. IDP helps automate the generation of customer risk profiles and mortgage document processing, reducing processing time to a few days.

An Accenture study found that 47% of customers prefer opening a new bank account online using a computer, while 37% prefer using the bank’s app or website.

The shifting consumer preferences point to a future where loan requests and processing are online and automated. Now is a great time to prepare your bank for that future.

4. Report Generation

All financial institutions need to generate reports for various purposes. For example, you might need to generate a report to show quarterly performance or transaction reports for a major client.

RPA can help generate reports automatically. The system can auto-fill details into a report and prepare an error-free report within seconds. An automated system can perform various other operations as well, such as extracting data from internal or external systems and fact-checking the reports.

5. Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Prevention

In Canada, banks need to ensure they are complying with the statutes of the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act, 2000. Depending on your location, compliance requirements might include ongoing risk-based assessment, customer due diligence, and educating staff and customers about AML laws.

A single AML investigation can take 30 minutes or more when assigned to an employee. However, automation can complete the same investigation much faster and minimize errors.

Using automation ensures you don’t spend too much money on AML investigations and stay compliant, so you don’t have to pay hefty fines.

6. Audits and Compliance

The cost of maintaining compliance can total up to $10,000 on average for large firms according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Maintaining compliance is expensive but less so than being non-compliant. For example, banks must ensure data accuracy when producing loan facility letters. However, instead of requiring employees to spend time meticulously verifying customer data, you can use intelligent document processing to save time and guarantee data accuracy.

Banking automation can help you save a good amount of money you currently spend on maintaining compliance. With automation, you can create workflows that satisfy compliance requirements without much manual intervention. These workflows are designed to automatically create audit trails so you can track the effectiveness of automated workflows and have compliance data to show when needed.

For example, you can set up a system to auto-freeze compromised accounts. Once the account is frozen, RPA can automatically complete the steps in your fraud investigation process. The system also creates an audit trail in the process.

Unlike humans, RPA can be active 24/7. Using RPA in banking can help ensure the accuracy of compliance processes, ensuring you’re compliant at all times without investing a lot of human resources towards compliance.

7. Decision Making

Managers at financial institutions need to make decisions about marketing, operations, and sales, but relying on raw data or external research doesn’t provide full context. RPA can help compile and analyze internal data to track client spending patterns and preferences.

AI and RPA-powered automation can help make decisions about timing marketing campaigns, redesigning workflows, and tailor-making products for your target audience. As a result, you improve the campaign’s effectiveness, process efficiency, and customer experience.

For example, when introducing a mortgage loan product, you can use RPA’s data analysis capabilities to identify location-specific and borrower-specific risks. RPA can compile a summary of the risks on a document, allowing the credit manager to study risk profiles without the associated manual work.

Blanc Labs’ Banking Automation Solutions

Blanc Labs works with financial organizations like banks, credit unions, and Fintechs to automate their processes.

We can create tailor-made automation software solutions based on your banks’ needs to minimize manual work and improve process efficiency. Our team can help you automate one or multiple parts of your workflow using technologies like RPA, AI, and ML.

Book a discovery call with us to see first-hand how automation can transform your bank’s core operations. We’ll create an automation solution specifically for your organization that works in tandem with your current internal systems.

The Transformative Power of Banking Automation

Back
Financial Services | Customer Experience | Enterprise Automation | IDP | RPA

The Transformative Power of Banking Automation

January 10, 2023
The Transformative Power of Banking Automation
Image credit: vectorjuice on Freepik

McKinsey expects machines to be responsible for up to 10% to 25% of a bank’s functions. The reasons? Banking automation minimizes the need for your team to work on repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on high-profile and strategic aspects of the business.

Automation also improves accuracy, which can save you a ton of money — a major reason why 80% of finance leaders have implemented or plan to implement Automation (including Robotic Process Automation).

Curious about how banking automation can help? We explain everything you need to know about how automating your banking workflow can help reduce costs and improve efficiency.

What is Banking Automation?

Banking automation involves using software powered by multiple technologies like AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) to automate repetitive tasks. Automation has three primary benefits:

  • Frees up your team’s time for more strategic tasks
  • Improves process accuracy
  • Improves the Customer Experience (CX) and the Employee Experience (EX)

For example, you can automate your account opening process. A customer requests a new account via the chatbot on your website. The chatbot provides an application form. The applicant fills out the form, and it’s sent to your RPA robot. The robot performs the basic procedures, including checking the credit score and KYC verification.

Next, the robot scans the applicant’s documents using OCR (optical character recognition) for data extraction. The robot matches the information in the documents and the application form. It flags any details that don’t match and sends them for manual approval.

The robot continues to validate uploaded documents using NLP (natural language processing). It finds key data points in the document’s free text, categorizes them, and uses them in the automated process.

The robot then updates the bank’s backend system to create a new business account, provided the customer’s data meets the bank policy. Once approved, the customer receives an automated welcome email.

Why Banks Need Banking Automation

Banks need automation to compete in the modern banking environment. Now, that’s a broad statement, so here are specific reasons why a modern bank needs automation:

  • Allowing employees to focus on tasks that require a human touch: Most banks were set up long ago. Manual forms and workflows were a foundational pillar for legacy banks, and as a result, employees spend countless hours on things like data entry and account verification. Automation allows employees to “hand over” repetitive tasks to software, freeing up their time for high-profile tasks that require a human touch.
  • Record management: RPA can generate and check expense records for compliance. It auto-logs all transactions and prepares the necessary financial records to get an overview of your business’s financial performance and position.
  • Meeting customer expectations: The need for speed is a key driver of a modern customer’s experience. If you’re taking too long for basic operations like opening a bank account, you’ll lose customers fast. Automation can help speed up your processes and help deliver on your customer’s expectations.
  • Faster customer support: Your customers hate waiting hours to get an answer. Automating your support using RPA helps you respond faster. You can answer customers’ questions at scale using a chatbot. Also, you can use an AI-powered chatbot to answer questions you haven’t added as an FAQ.

These factors make automation more of a necessity than a nice-to-have — you need automation to compete neck-and-neck with other banks.

How Banking Automation Can Transform Your Bank

Transforming your bank’s value network with automation offers many benefits in various business aspects, including finance, legal, and customer experience. Here are the benefits of using RPA in banking:

Banking Automation Leads to Efficiency

You can improve productivity by up to 80%, especially if you identify the most impactful productivity levers. The efficiency improvement is a result of two factors:

  • Low manual effort: Employees have more time available once they hand over repetitive tasks to software. They can do more in the same amount of time, helping you scale your operations.
  • Improved accuracy: Errors are expensive because you spend time and resources on correcting the errors. Fewer errors = improved productivity.

A great example of efficiency is automated document processing. As a banker, you probably spend a good number of hours reading documents and inserting relevant data into your systems, depending on your role at the bank. However, you don’t have to spend all those hours manually entering data if you use intelligent document processing.

Better Customer Experience

An average company takes over 12 hours to respond to customer service requests. That’s a recipe for dissatisfied customers, especially if you’re a financial institution.

Your customers expect their money to be in the hands of a reliable entity, and guess what you communicate when you don’t answer customers for over 12 hours?

Using RPA to automate your customer support helps minimize response times. In most cases, the chatbot can provide real-time answers to the most commonly asked questions.

Speed is also critical for other client-side processes. For example, you want to be as fast as possible in opening accounts, processing personal investment requests, or enabling additional services for an account. Automating these processes (while ensuring accuracy) helps improve customer experience.

Compliance and Risk Reporting

According to Deloitte, the cost of compliance for retail and corporate banks has increased by over 60% since the pre-financial crisis spending levels. Non-compliance is even more expensive, but automation can help lower your spending on compliance.

RPA builds compliance into your processes. Automating compliance ensures you’re always meeting regulatory requirements without requiring teams to spend extra time double-checking for compliance.

Automation also creates an audit trail and automatically generates risk reports that give you added insights. The system can identify and flag suspicious activities so that you can investigate them.

Reduced Costs

It’s easy to see how banking automation using RPA can reduce costs. Reduced administrative load, saving time on repetitive tasks, and speeding up processes all yield dividends.

For example, Radius financial group reduced loan processing costs by 70% by using AI to automate their process.

Banking automation also removes human error, so you’ll spend less on fixing those mistakes.

Without automation, you’d need to invest a large amount of money in building more teams as you scale. However, automation empowers you to scale faster. You can continue investing in training current teams and save on costs you’d incur to accommodate a larger workforce.

Automation and Adaptability

Banking automation helps banks adapt faster to a client’s needs or the business environment.

For example, the increasing popularity of Fintech is one of the most significant concerns for banks. Fintechs are quickly gaining market share at the expense of legacy banks. Customers appreciate how a fintech offers better, faster services.

Fintechs aren’t the only factor banks need to consider, though. Your bank might want to integrate banking solutions with a new partner’s ecosystem to offer additional services like tax consulting. Or your bank needs to process offshore transactions faster, especially when the transaction is subject to jurisdictional restrictions on the amount of transfer allowed.

Adaptability is critical for banks to succeed, and automation can make adapting to changes seamless. Implementing an automation solution will improve your adaptability to changes and allow you to quickly catch up with your modern competitors.

The Bottom Line

Over the past five decades, banking has gone from paper-based to almost entirely digital. Next up? Automation.

Automation makes banking frictionless for both internal and external stakeholders — it’s a win-win. The only problem banks face with automation is the lack of a reliable partner who can guide them through the transformation journey. Book a discovery call with us, and we’ll answer all your banking automation questions.

Top Use Cases of Intelligent Document Processing

Back
Financial Services | Digital Transformation | Enterprise Automation | IDP | Lending Technology

Top Use Cases of Intelligent Document Processing

November 22, 2022
IDP

Currently, most enterprises have a workflow rampant with manual document-heavy processing.

However, businesses are quickly digitizing their document-processing workflows. 50% of B2B invoices across the globe will be processed without manual intervention according to a Gartner study. The reason? Manual document processing is more expensive than the cost of the documents themselves.

For example, the average cost of processing a single invoice was $10.89 in 2021. Manual document processing is also prone to human errors like fat finger errors. In a world where 90% of the data is unstructured, you need a tool that can automatically convert unstructured data into structured data to supercharge your productivity.

This guide explains how you can use intelligent document processing to save your business plenty of money, time, and resources.

What is Intelligent Document Processing?

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is a technology that automatically extracts unstructured data from multiple document sources, including images, online forms, and PDFs. IDP is also known as Cognitive Document Processing (CDP).

IDP converts this unstructured data into structured data using multiple technologies, including natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), optical character recognition (OCR), and intelligent character recognition (ICR). Together, these technologies make IDP intelligent.

OCR is often used interchangeably with IDP. However, that’s not true. IDP uses OCR as one of the technologies to extract data.

How Does Intelligent Document Processing Work?

Here’s how a document is processed using IDP:

  • Conversion: An IDP platform starts by capturing your document through a scanning device. Once it converts a physical document into a digital one, it starts ingesting data.
  • Document image processing: The document’s image is processed for optimal OCR and archival.
  • Reading text using OCR: OCR helps the machine accurately read the scanned document’s text.
  • Identify language elements with NLP: IDP platforms use NLP to find language elements using methods like feature-based tagging and sentiment analysis.
  • Machine learning algorithm classifies information: A combination of machine learning and other techniques is used to classify the information in the document.
  • Extracting elements using AI: IDP uses AI to extract information elements like contact numbers, addresses, and names.
  • Validation: IDP platforms validate information using third-party databases and lexicons for data validation. Data points are flagged when the platform can’t validate them so someone from the team can review them manually.

Top Intelligent Data Processing Use Cases in Banking

Reading and writing financial documents make up a large portion of a bank’s workflow. As a bank, you need to process data fast to offer best-in-class services to your customers without making errors.

IDP helps banks guarantee accuracy and efficiency to their clients. In addition to data extraction’s key role in a bank’s workflow, banks can also use IDP platforms for fraud detection.

Here are some of the most common use cases of IDP for banks.

Mortgage Underwriting

Customer satisfaction with mortgage originators reduced by five points on a 1,000-point scale in 2021 according to a study by J.D. Power driven by record mortgage origination volume. Banks need to automate their mortgage workflow to scale as the demand grows. After all, customer satisfaction is one of the most significant differentiators in the mortgage industry.

The mortgage workflow involves collecting various documents. Extracting data from these documents is one of the major factors slowing down the workflow. This is where an IDP tool can help streamline your mortgage workflow.

An IDP tool helps you speed up the underwriting process with automation. It automatically reads and extracts relevant data and relays it to your bank’s credit evaluation system.

Claims Processing

The P&C Customer Satisfaction Survey reveals that the claim filing process is the biggest driver of customer satisfaction.

However, the claims processing workflow can be complex. Claims data comes in various formats—customers might send data as word files, PDFs, and images. Plus, you might receive the data via multiple channels—you might receive it via email, chat, or over a call.

Unifying this data without manual effort is a massive challenge. Traditionally, banks used OCR to process physical documents. However, the lack of accuracy required manual review.

An IDP tool is a great alternative to OCR for claims processing. Thanks to technologies like NLP, computer vision, and deep learning, it provides greater accuracy than traditional OCR.

Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding is one of the most resource-intensive processes for a bank. Banks spend an average of $280 to onboard a single client according to Backbase—the cost can add up when you’re onboarding hundreds or thousands of customers every month.

Many of these expenses go towards processing documents, including the bank’s forms, credit reports, or tax returns. Sure, you can try automating this workflow. However, the automation will break down as soon as a new document type is introduced or you change your form’s template.

An IDP tool can help tame your customer onboarding costs. Your customers will appreciate a fast onboarding experience, and you’ll save money, increase productivity, and make an excellent first impression.

Financial Document Analysis

Banks handle thousands of financial documents every day. From financial statements to tax returns, carefully studying financial documents is critical to a bank’s operations.

Financial analysis is a cognitively heavy task. Why make your team spend time on mundane tasks like manipulating data when you can use an IDP tool to automate this process and enable your team to concentrate on their more complex deliverables.

Using an IDP tool helps analysts automatically structure and populate relevant financial data into their system. You’ll do your analyst team a favor by eliminating a lot of their manual work, allowing them to focus on analysis.

KYC Process Automation

KYC (Know Your Customer), Re-KYC, and C-KYC are critical for compliance. Banks might need to refer to a customer’s KYC details at various stages during a customer’s journey.

However, handling hand-written KYC forms is a hassle. Migrating a customer’s KYC data comes with challenges like human error and work overload. Committing errors when underwriting a mortgage or onboarding a customer costs money, but failing to comply with KYC requirements may increase the legal, compliance and regulatory risks.

Using IDP ensures accuracy, so you never have to lose your reputation and pay a fine for failing to comply with KYC norms.  The McKinsey KYC Benchmark Survey found that by increasing end-to-end KYC-process automation by 20%, an organization could enjoy the following positive outcomes:

  • Increased quality assurance by 13%
  • Improved customer experience (by reducing customer outreach frequency) by 18%
  • Increased the number of cases processed per month by 48%

The Bottom Line

Banks process a colossal amountnumber of documents and data each day. Getting new customer data into the system, processing claims, and analyzing financial statements are heavily data-driven tasks that involve dozens of documents from hundreds of customers.

The probability of committing errors is high. Banks also need a large team just to process documents and structure the data in those documents.

Banks need an IDP tool to automate this process and remove the risk of error from the process. It also integrates with applications to make migrating the data easier. An IDP tool also validates data and alerts team members in exception cases, when it requires a human to review accuracy.

It is important to select an IDP tool that offers the right solutions for your industry. Better yet, find a partner who can create a custom IDP solution tailor-made for you.

Why Choose Blanc Labs Intelligent Document Processing?

Blanc Labs partners with financial organizations like banks, credit unions, and fintechs to automate operations.

We can help you create robust automation solutions that minimize manual effort, reduce errors, and improve productivity. Our team helps you use the most advanced technologies including AI and ML to automate complex, resource-heavy processes like document processing.

Book a discovery call with us if your financial organization deals with plenty of documents daily. We’ll come up with a tailor-made solution to minimize the friction in your document processing workflow.

Innovation Is The Key To Digitally Transform Financial Services

Back
Financial Services | Digital Transformation | Innovation | Leadership

Innovation Is The Key To Digitally Transform Financial Services

November 8, 2022

In a world where customers are becoming increasingly demanding, we need to find new ways of meeting their needs. The only way to do this is through innovation.

In this Business Ninjas podcast, our CEO, Hamid Akbari, talks about how Blanc Labs helps financial services organizations evolve their technology to meet new customer needs and make the most of market opportunities.

For more information on how Blanc Labs can help with digital transformation, get in touch.

Finding the right API Management Platform

Back
Financial Services | API Management | Digital Banking | IT Management

Finding the right API Management Platform

November 3, 2022
API management

APIs are an integral part of today’s digital world. They are used for secure data exchange, integration, and content syndication. As APIs become more ubiquitous in enterprise businesses, it becomes necessary to manage them efficiently.

Banking and Payments ecosystems are converging with Open Banking and Finance. Whether regulatory or market driven, these digital interactions are happening already – and growing exponentially. Doing APIs and API Management right are central to the growing interdependence and interoperability between Fintechs, Banks and Consumers. Stakeholders are demanding secure access to financial data to drive better customer experiences. A key enabler to that end are the systems that surround APIs.

What is API Lifecycle Management?

API Lifecycle Management is the process of building, controlling, distributing, analyzing, and reusing APIs. It also can include capabilities around intelligent discovery; one pane of glass visible across multiple API gateways and API management systems; bringing to life the visionary end state of monetizing and marketing all these capabilities to external parties to operationalize the concept of “API as a product”. Thus, there are many API Management solutions in the market offering a variety of features. But at the very minimum, an API Manager should allow users to do the following:

Discover APIs

Before you can more effectively govern their lifecycle, you need a simple and configurable tool to find, filter and tag all your API assets into a centralized repository. Simplify complexity and/or get better visibility and facts to position your organization to “open itself up” to the new business realities and opportunities emerging.

Design, build, and Test APIs

The API Management tool should provide everyone, from developers to partners, the ability to create APIs under a unified catalog and test their performance.

Deploy APIs

API Management tools should also allow you to publish APIs on-premises, on the cloud or in a hybrid environment. Additionally, the API Manager may give you a choice between managing the API infrastructure in the tool itself or on your own.

Secure APIs

By providing a central point of control, most API Management tools will ensure that you have full visibility of all your APIs across environments so you can mitigate any vulnerabilities.

Manage APIs

API Management tools should give you a central plane of visibility into APIs, events, and microservices. Most API management tools will allow you to govern APIs across all environments (on-premise, hybrid, cloud) and also allow you to integrate with other infrastructures, including AWS, Azure, and Mulesoft. A good API management tool should also provide multiple predefined policy filters to accelerate policy configuration.

Analyze APIs

An API Manager should give you real time metrics in a unified catalog. By providing data on the business performance or operations across your APIs, you can make better decisions leading to improved business results.

Extend and Reuse APIs

By giving you a single, unified catalog, an API Manager can eliminate duplication and extend the life of APIs through reuse.

The need for API Management

API management centralizes control of your API program—including analytics, access control, monetization, and developer workflows. It provides dependability, flexibility (to adapt to shifting needs), quality, and speed. To achieve these goals, an API Manager should, at the minimum, offer rate limits, access control, and usage policies.

Essential features of an API Manager tool

1. API Gateways

A gateway is the single entry point for all clients and is the most critical aspect of API management. An API gateway handles all the data routing requests and protocol translations between third-party providers (TPP) and the client. Gateways are equally important when securing API connections by deploying authentication and enforcement protocols.

2. Developer Portal

The primary use of the developer portal is to provide a hub, specifically for developers, to access and share API documentation. It is an essential part of streamlining communications between teams. Typically, developer portals are built on content management systems (CMS), allowing developers to explore, read, and test APIs. Other features of a developer portal could include chat forums for the internal and external developer community and FAQs.

3. API Lifecycle Management

As the name suggests, API Lifecycle Management provides an end-to-end view of how to manage APIs. API Lifecycle Management is a means to create a secure ecosystem for building, deploying, testing and monetizing and marketing APIs.

4. Analytics engine

The analytics engine identifies usage patterns, analyzes historical data, and creates tests for API performance to detect integration issues and assist in troubleshooting. The information gathered by the analytics engine can be used by business owners and technology teams to optimize their API offerings and improve them over time.

5. API monetization and marketing

API management tools can provide a framework for pricing and packaging APIs for partners and developers. Monetizing APIs involves generating revenue and keeping the API operational for consumers. Through usage contracts, you can monetize the microservices behind APIs. An API management tool will offer templatized usage contracts based on predefined metrics, including the number of API calls. This empowers innovative external players to help drive your business in ways you have not dreamed up yet – and still do it securely.

How successful is your API management?

Now that we know the features of an ideal API management software, how do you evaluate its success for your API efforts? Here are a few ways to track your progress:

Speed
How rapidly can you launch your APIs to meet your business goals? Latency and throughput are ways to measure the speed of deployment. Other areas to measure speed would be onboarding and upgrading APIs.

Flexibility
Flexibility is the breadth of options available to developers when adopting APIs. The greater the flexibility, the higher the cost and effort to manage the API.

Dependability
How available your APIs are to developers. One way to measure dependability is downtime. Quota is another way to restrict how many API calls can be made by a developer within a certain timeframe. Enforcing quotas makes API management more predictable and protects the API from abuse.

Quality
Stable APIs with consistent performance reflect higher quality. It is a way to measure a developer’s satisfaction with the API.

Cost
The above four factors contribute to cost. If your API management software provides a better view of all your APIs, it will reduce duplication and costs. Reuse of APIs is another way that you can save costs.

How are you managing API complexity?

If you are a business leader concerned about how to meet market demand through the creation and deployment of APIs, or you would like to monetize and reuse your existing APIs and reduce costs, then you need structured API management.

In partnership with Axway, Blanc Labs offers a way to manage your APIs to bring maximum business value. Axway’s API Management Platform enables enterprises to manage and govern their APIs for developing and applying their digital services.

Book a discovery call with Blanc Labs to learn more. 

thirdstream and Blanc Labs collaborating to bring intelligent document processing to financial institutions

Back
Financial Services | Digital Banking | IDP | Partners

thirdstream and Blanc Labs collaborating to bring intelligent document processing to financial institutions

October 25, 2022
Digital Lending

Document understanding and data extraction are keys to accelerating account opening and supporting underwriting of new retail and commercial accounts.

thirdstream, a leading provider of retail, commercial and credit card onboarding services, deployed with over 40 Canadian financial institutions, today announced a partnership with Blanc Labs, a trusted technology innovation partner to leading financial institutions. The collaboration injects Blanc Labs’ Intelligent Document Automation (IDA) onto thirdstream’s platform, extending existing services to include a proven solution that removes up to 80% of manual document reviews, thereby improving the customer and member experience.

“Our goal is to help our clients continually improve the experience for applicants and account holders. Our partnership with Blanc Labs leverages our Platform-as-a-Service, where our clients will be able to spin up the services Blanc Labs has already deployed with leading financial institutions, reducing the reliance on employee reviews of documentation,” said CEO Keith Ginter. “For those already using the thirdstream platform as part of their onboarding process, Blanc Labs’ Intelligent Document Automation (IDA) helps remove up to 80% of the manual document reviews and results in considerable improvement of the customer experience.”

Automated document understanding and data extraction are some of the keys to moving faster, especially when onboarding new commercial deposits and retail lending customers. thirdstream and Blanc Labs present a structured series of steps to deliver starting with the moment of customer engagement to data extraction using artificial intelligence  from each page of documentation. This eliminates the need for the manual entry of data, with complete and accurate data presented as part of the decisioning and account creation experience.

“Our services today address challenges across the financial ecosystem. Together with thirdstream, we’d like to offer faster time to value realization with our solution. Blanc Labs’ Intelligent Document Automation eliminates manual intervention and creates a compelling value proposition for banks, financial services, and insurance institutions. By increasing operational efficiencies, banks can focus on creating additional revenue streams and provide greater value for the end customer,” says Hamid Akbari, Blanc Labs’ CEO.

thirdstream and Blanc Labs help financial institutions deploy new products and services faster – a key consideration in today’s economy – as they build improved personalized services at scale. Our solution benefits financial institutions looking for pre-integrated innovative solutions that can de-risk and accelerate their modernization and digital transformation efforts.

About thirdstream

thirdstream is headquartered in Lethbridge, Alberta, providing digital account opening solutions, online and in-branch, to over forty Canadian banks, credit unions and trust companies. From identity verification to account funding, thirdstream’s solutions support consumer and business account opening, credit card onboarding, and unsecured retail lending, including adjudication. The thirdstream platform is cloud-deployed, designed for retail and business consumers seeking out financial institutions, and for financial institutions targeting consumers anywhere, any time, from any device. To learn more, visit www.thirdstream.ca.

About Blanc Labs

Blanc Labs is a preferred partner for enterprises looking to digitize and build the next generation of technology products and services. To help companies rapidly deliver on their digital initiatives, Blanc Labs has developed expertise and bespoke solutions in a wide variety of applications in financial services, healthcare, enterprise productivity, and customer experience. Headquartered in Toronto, Blanc Labs serves the Americas through operations in Toronto, New York, Bogota, and Buenos Aires. For more information on how Blanc Labs is building a better future, visit www.blanclabs.com.

Developing the next generation of talent at Blanc Labs’ Digital Academy

Back
Partners | Leadership | STEM | Talent

Developing the next generation of talent at Blanc Labs’ Digital Academy

October 19, 2022
Digital Academy

In August of this year, we launched the Digital Academy at Blanc Labs, where 100 students in Colombia had the opportunity to learn from our experts on topics that we consider key to our business.

The students that joined the program as Associates, gained knowledge of fundamental concepts of agile methodologies, cloud computing, full-stack development, and RPA (Robotics Process Automation).

The Digital Academy community recently shared their top takeaways from this experience.

Promoting a culture of learning at Blanc Labs

“Walking alone through the world of technology is not easy. I am sure many of us have encountered some barriers, such as not understanding what we hear in a video tutorial, or you end up having lots of questions. When we are reading the technical documentation, it may become even more complex. These situations make me appreciate my technology education teachers and the people who share their knowledge with me,” says Gustavo Camargo, a Software Engineering Associate, who is committed to achieving his dream of working in the IT industry.

Martin Bec, who shared his experience as a Full-stack Developer in our latest bootcamp, says: “Teaching and sharing  knowledge is part of my lifelong learning way of living. I encourage others to clear up their doubts and I appreciate the opportunity to learn. My own learning approach significantly affects how I lead others to strengthen their career in IT.”

Working in technology requires a combination of technical skills and soft skills

By being exposed to various virtual collaboration opportunities, students work on their communication, relationship-building, teamwork, and cultural awareness skills. One of their main challenges is to overcome the language barrier, identifying how to strengthen their learning in a second language in their spare time and the IT top skills they require for a booming professional career.

“With agile methodologies, I learned that good planning is key, and I apply that thinking to my personal life. Fulfilling projects requires perseverance, coherence, and the team’s motivation to continue. There may be changes along the way, but the agile methodology is flexible with this, and you learn how to prioritize your work and focus on progress”, says Jennyfer Belalcazar, Systems Engineering Student.

According to a Gartner study published in March 2022, an agile developer must master methods, techniques, behaviors, and various fundamental aspects of Engineering.

  • Methods such as Scrum and Kanban, implementing Agile pilots, pivoting, and adjusting the strategy, and evaluating risks and results for the business, are highly valued
  • Understanding metrics, and User Stories are essential to promote feedback with stakeholders and gain in-depth knowledge to overcome project challenges
  • Customer focus, continuous learning, and collaboration significantly impact interactions and work styles
  • The adoption of best practices, and the importance of test-first thinking, are fundamental for execution. The incorporation of agile architecture and the training of Database Administrators with a set of multidisciplinary skills impacts Agile teams’ performance

As complementary activities to their learning experience, Associates have created sessions to strengthen their conversational skills in English and they engage in activities to improve their personal brand and prepare for job interviews.

As Associates evolve in their learning experience, they gain the most valued skills in this industry. Most students combine their Digital Academy experience with technical education, short courses, and other IT programs, particularly in development, programming, and Data Science.

Building a culture of learning, fostering technology education, and empowering our team is fundamental to the success of our projects.Discover how Blanc Labs can bring an agile and strategic approach to your digital transformation project. Get in touch. 

Blanc Labs CEO Hamid Akbari Speaks On What It Takes To Scale Up Successfully

Back
Technology | Digital Transformation | Leadership | Podcast

Blanc Labs CEO Hamid Akbari Speaks On What It Takes To Scale Up Successfully

October 7, 2022

You don’t have to be a #Fortune500 company to start thinking strategically about the future of your business. Technology services firms that commit to strategic methods and sustainable growth mechanisms early on can experience exponential profitability.

The way forward is not always clear, but technology services firms can take it one step at a time. Hiring great people, adapting technological breakthroughs, and staying connected with the needs of their customers all contribute to success.

In this podcast hosted by Collective 54, our CEO, Hamid Akbari, talks about what it takes to scale up a company in today’s competitive landscape.

Blanc Labs and Axway partner up to provide integrated open banking solutions for all

Back
Financial Services | API Management | IT Management | Open Banking

Blanc Labs and Axway partner up to provide integrated open banking solutions for all

October 5, 2022
Blanc Labs and Axway

Axway (Euronext: AXW.PA), a leading provider of open banking built on the Amplify API management platform, is proud to announce its partnership with Blanc Labs, a trusted financial service and healthcare innovation partner.

While the largest banks are already well along their digital journey, many others are still tasked with competing in what can feel like an uneven playing field. Financial institutions must have a clear strategy for implementing, governing, monetizing, and marketing APIs to ensure a frictionless customer experience and better business results.

“We want to help all banks – anyone who has something to bring to the table – to strategize and compete in the open banking arena,” said Eyal Sivan, Head of Open Banking at Axway. “They will thrive as they embrace open APIs, build on trusted customer relationships, and meet their customers’ needs wherever they are.”

“At Blanc Labs, we help our clients achieve extraordinary results by accelerating their digital transformation journey,” says Blanc Labs CEO Hamid Akbari. “APIzation will enable secure data interoperability within the financial services ecosystem. Open banking and Banking-as-a-Service pose a disruption challenge as well as a massive growth opportunity for banks and fintechs.”

The specialized solutions offered by Blanc Labs together with Axway make API integrations more efficient and cost-effective thanks to universal API management. Benefits of the unified API platform include:

  1. Increased productivity as developers easily find and repurpose APIs, eliminating duplication of efforts
  2. Less technical complexity by unifying and simplifying API services across the organization
  3. Stronger security thanks to a unified, vendor-agnostic view of all APIs
  4. Faster legacy system upgrades through an API-first layer, which simplifies the addition of new services
  5. More robust governance through centralized documentation for multiple developer teams

“Partnering with Axway, a pioneer in API management and the open banking space, is a natural fit for us. Out-of-the-box support for open banking and common data standards will significantly reduce the cost of building next-gen financial services and will accelerate time-to-market for our clients,” Akbari adds.

As banks gain confidence with Axway and Blanc Labs open banking solutions, they can move from optimizing processes and keeping up with industry standards to unlocking new business models, discovering richer customer data insights, and building highly personalized services to delight their clients.

Learn more about the Axway-Blanc Labs partnership and how they can help banks fully participate in the growing open banking ecosystem, here.

About Blanc Labs

Blanc Labs is a preferred partner for enterprises looking to digitize and build the next generation of technology products and services. To help companies rapidly deliver on their digital initiatives, Blanc Labs has developed expertise and bespoke solutions in a wide variety of applications in  financial services, healthcare, enterprise productivity and customer experience. Headquartered in Toronto, Blanc Labs serves the Americas through operations in Toronto, New York, Bogota and Buenos Aires. For more information on how Blanc Labs is building a better future, visit www.blanclabs.com.

About Axway

Axway enables enterprises to securely open everything by integrating and moving data across a complex world of new and old technologies. Axway’s API-driven B2B integration and MFT software, refined over 20 years, complements Axway Amplify, an open API management platform that makes APIs easier to discover and reuse across multiple teams, vendors, and cloud environments. Axway has helped over 11,000 businesses unlock the full value of their existing digital ecosystems to create brilliant experiences, innovate new services, and reach new markets. Learn more at axway.com.

 

logo
Follow Us
Company
  • Who We Are
  • Careers
  • Partners
Services
  • Innovation & Design
  • Technology Strategy and Implementation
  • AI, Analytics & Automation
Industry
  • Financial Services
  • Healthcare
Follow Us
Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Stay informed with a monthly digest of important news and updates.

2024 ©

Blanc Labs Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy