Financial institutions looking to mitigate manual data entry and increase efficiencies are turning to automation for their document-heavy operations.

Document processing allows banks to capture data and filter it for employee use, compliance needs or audits, Joe Labbe, vice president of product development at intelligent document processing firm KnowledgeLake, said today during the webinar “The Future of Document Processing Automation,” presented by Bank Automation News.

1. Intelligent capture

Intelligent capture software allows banks to extract data using machine learning (ML) to eliminate errors and automatically classify documents with the ability to recognize and quantify the types of pages within a document, according to KnowledgeLake’s website.

This can be critical to saving time and operating costs, allowing for high-volume document processing with minimal risk of error, Labbe said.

“With intelligent capture, you need to make sure that the service has the ability to receive documents through any channel and what would be called omnichannel capture capability,” he said, noting that it’s critical to ensure the correct version has been received.

Once organized, intelligent capture can be turned into data for actionable business insights that drive enterprise decision-making while maintaining processes that are critical for everyday operations, compliance or audits, Labbe added.

2. Automated workflow

Banks can then use machine learning to process the actionable data into an automated workflow, Labbe said.

“This is applicable to structured documents, semi-structured [documents] and increasingly unstructured documents, like contracts,” he said.

Technologies including APIs or robotic process automation (RPA) can organize data into a structure of rules defined by the bank rather than a software provider, Labbe added.

3. Accessible repositories

Bank employees can gain access to the information through a search function once the data is collected and stored in one defined channel, Labbe said.

“Compliance and exporting of documents and analysis of documents becomes a lot easier because you only have to go to one source as opposed to try to figure out where all these documents are scattered across,” he said.

Using an omnichannel approach, the information can then be analyzed from a centralized document store that is secure, scalable, cloud-based and available to employees, Labbe noted.

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