CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Unstructured data in documents is an automation focus for the Bank of Montreal.

The $773 billion bank is employing artificial intelligence-based (AI) document handling as a chief technology, Atul Verma, BMO’s CIO of U.S. personal and business banking said Tuesday during the Bank Automation Summit 2022.

Intelligent document processing using technologies such as optical character recognition (OCR) is key to streamlining lending workflows at the Canadian bank, he added.

“We have more work to do in how we handle documents in the process,” Verma said. “We talked about OCR, we talked about document handling and how you feed documents into various parts of the workflow to make it more efficient versus learning everything in a central repository.”

Document AI, a technology, which uses machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze and review documents, is a tool the bank is utilizing for total workflow automation.

Verma was quick to add that BMO’s automation journey is on a longer timeline than some might expect.

“The automation roadmap takes us further into more of an AI-based automation journey, from the documents, OCR, things like that,” Verma said. “I don’t think the journey will be complete anytime soon.”