Loraine Lawson
Good day and welcome to Bank Automation’s podcast series, The Buzz. I’m Loraine Lawson, and recently I spoke with Sateesh Seetharamiah, whole-time Director and the Chief Business Officer and Global Head, Edge Products at Edgeverve. Edgeverve offers an intelligent document processing solution and is a subsidiary of the IT services company, Infosys. Mr. Seetharamiah discussed the value proposition for Intelligent document processing and shared best practices for banks and credit unions starting out with IDP.

Sateesh Seetharamiah
Let me let me give you a quick background in terms of value, right? If you were to look at intelligent document processing page, when you look at five different value areas, one is customer experience. You know, as an example, it could be customer onboarding, loan processing, loan dispersal, even simple things like customer profile changes, all of these things, which includes documents can be completely into an automated using IDP. So that’s one benefit which is customer experience. Second area of value that you can get is regulatory compliance. KYC, as I mentioned, is around regulation compliance. So you could potentially you was just another one where we’ve seen our customers use in his managing some government regulatory changes since regulations to change. So as they change, how do you adopt, how do you make sure the documents are aligned? Or are you out of compliance? Or what do you need to do, etc, etc. All of this was pretty manual. And even today it is. And now, IDP can actually completely automate this. So the second area is regulatory compliance. The third area of benefit is around risk mitigation. Right? If you look at mergers and acquisitions, in fact, we’re working with a very, very large firm, which is doing mergers right now and doing acquisitions, where they actually are getting they’re getting 1000s and 1000s, are contracting to the enterprise. And they don’t really know what the underlying real liabilities and risks are, and basically extracted is able to extract all this information and provide to them in a very, very, you know, in a consumable way. What are the risks that are out there? How do you really make obviously, the mitigation is something that they have to come up with, but this becomes gives a very clear, comprehensive risk structure and liability structure. The other is in analyzing security instruments, right? This is what we’re doing with some of the other banking firms. So risk mitigation is one area. The fourth one is general operational efficiency, right? If you look at reduction of human effort, faster, time to market, shorter time to service customers. Right. And also, one other, you know, we’ve kind of realized, as we’ve worked with hundreds of such enterprises is they have been till now operationally, somewhat, you know, restricted because of all the different languages, especially in the globalization era, where there’s so many languages out there in the world, how they structure their operations to manage all of this language was dictated by the know how of language of the individuals around the world. Today, with this kind of technology coming in, it gives them certain amount of flexibility in terms of how they can structure their operations, and their organization structure to deal with these concepts. And lastly, but not least, the most important value stream is around evolution of the future workforce. You know, what’s really happening? If you look at all of these things, whether it’s RPA, this IDP, you know, all of these things, let’s take a step back and look what’s really happening. We’re driving basically, the enterprise is moving towards a very, very different workforce in the future. And what is that? And then that basically, there’s a symbiotic relationship, if you will, between the humans and the digital workers. That’s the future. And the future is almost here. It’s just a question as we’re accelerating more on it now as everyday progresses is what acceleration, right? Because technology has arrived. Right? And, and I see there’s a symbiotic relationship, it means that the humans, you know, basically will provide the creativity and empathy element, as more and more of this maturity happens. And whereas they will leave all things to do with the digital worker to do with productivity and predictive. And that’s what it is, right? The future is about humans doing with creativity and empathy. And the bots and the digital workers doing more productivity and predictability. So in edge over, you know, we have looked at this phenomenon, this is a very, very, very serious phenomenon that’s evolving. And enterprises have to adopt to this phenomenon that we have carved out this Frank call this phenomenon, automation singularity. And we’ve spoken a lot about automation singularity and how this affects enterprises and how they can really get up to deal with an IDP in a way fits into the this. I have digressed from your core question, but I wanted to give you this broad, you know, canvas of possibilities of IDP and why this is important for enterprise to actually jump in and start doing it because this is happening, right?

Loraine Lawson
Yeah, that’s that’s very broad look, and this, you’re correct. You’re absolutely correct. I mean, that’s where that’s where that’s where we cover automation for we think it’s going to transform. Or

Sateesh Seetharamiah
Maybe we should do one , or just automation. And we’ll talk a little more about deeply about the stuff. Yeah,

Loraine Lawson
let’s do that. But what about the best practices for deploying IDP? Like, what are some takeaways? If you are dealing with a bank, in particular financial institution? What are some things you need them to know? Or they need to do to fund to get the most value or to find success with RDP? Is there are the things they need to do to prepare before they deploy at IDP?

Sateesh Seetharamiah
Great question, or in I think, see, one is, you know, I would say, generally, quoting value mapping, I think is important for enterprise. First of all, I think they should know that IDP is here. Now it’s happening. We need to jump in try it. I don’t think enterprises should shy of a new technology, but it works. Second, the Financial Services also Lorraine happens to be a third of the total IDP market today. So there’s a lot of firms already moving industry lateral, small, big doesn’t matter what they’ve taught me. If you’ve not I would urge them to actually get on this journey. Now what they need to do is to look at, you know, all the processes where they believe there is not a documented Right, good place to start. And also look at some of these documents which are, which are valuable, which have valuable information that is very relevant. Look at processes which have documents that touch your customers at the end of the day, can you really make your customer journey? Far more richer data than you have today? Right? So, so one is to look at all the documents and processes that deals with documents and create that kind of format. Right? That’s one step one, you can do irrespective before you get into any of the technology stuff. And you get a sense of, you know, what’s out there, that you probably been living with till today that you could probably go after, as an example, underwriting in insurance is big. And we have an offering and expected catering specifically for commercial Internet underwriting. Right. And, and it’s very, very interesting, because underwriting obviously, is very costly, very expensive process. And also, there’s huge amount of decision making, which leads to risk and liabilities to the organization. And this technology augments and makes that far more better. So is to look at these processes, and can I bring them out here, one second, is to start small. And if you’ve not started passport, get going start small, and then slowly build over time. And then you have to obviously make the decision on, you know, the platform itself. As I mentioned, you know, you can look at a platform, it only does OCR, that many platform, it only provides that there are many platforms, it only gives you a small element of machine learning, maybe not matching more platforms that have maybe computer vision, you know, what is important for what we have seen, at least you know, basing, no matter where you start, I think eventually organizations realize they need a comprehensive platform that does all, if you really want to look at document digitization as an important element of the digital transformation church, and make document digitization, you know, pervasive in your enterprise, and democratized. If you want to go in that direction, then I would urge enterprise to look at an advantage of all if it is comprehensive, it provides everything from OCR, to all the way to NLP and computer vision, machine learning and all of that stuff. The other is, you know, like any other AI initiative, you know, even in this, they will face similar challenges, right, which is start with areas where you have enough data. If you don’t have data, AI will work. Because it’s all around training, the model, training the machine to understand what you really want you to understand. So it means you need to have good data. So look at processes that not only have document but you have a good amount of historical data that you could feed the machine and make it help learn, right. Second is obviously there is change management, like any other digital transformation, this is one such as change management, there will be naysayers, you will have to bring them on board. And lastly, it has nothing to do with again, IDP only Lorraine, but more broadly, you got to invest in upskilling your employees? These are new technology, sometimes there’ll be a prehension wonder what is this thing? You know, I don’t know what it is. So I think some investment in, you know, employee education around making them comfortable. Making them feel that this is going to augment their own productivity and nothing else to make their own life better. Right. Make it far more, Richard. I think it’s I think that kind of upskilling and some amount of if you will Evangelization is necessary.

Loraine Lawson
We you say what would you say is take a small entry point, do you have some examples? Or just a example of what would be a small entry point for a credit union or bank? Yeah, well,

Sateesh Seetharamiah
It would be some simple documents, such as if you were to look at claims. These are standard documents, right? They look very similar. They don’t have any variations. All you looking at Bank form for a court forms, you know, these kinds of things, which are very, very similar looking forms, were simple. OCR can actually can provide certain benefits to you, right, you don’t need complicated technology to come in. So that would be one way to start. And as you move through it, you know, a little more, you move into the semi structured document, you get into invoices, and bills and those kinds of things where you also have, you know, certain, you know, pictorial stuff in the document that has a little bit of complexity. Finally, you got to get to contracts. But what we’ve also seen Lorraine is if you embrace the right platform, you can jump into the most complex ones, if you have data, keys that if you have a library of documents that you can feed you can do the most complex ones because platform enables you to do that. Right. But this is this word simple starting means document which are Very, very similar looking claims, you know. And so those kinds of things.

Loraine Lawson
If you have time, what are the say three biggest mistakes you see people make with ADP? When they do deploy it? What are some, you know, guess lessons learned? How can they get avoid these mistakes?

Sateesh Seetharamiah
I probably repeat myself here. I think the biggest is to make sure that you pick an area where you have enough documents and the registry of documents to feed, if you don’t have enough documents, it can be tough. Right? So one is to make sure that you pick those areas, it’s like any other AI project in that sense, right. So so to do that, and significant number of banks that I work with, and we work with have large volumes of documents in some of these areas, right. So just to look at that, that is one. And second is, you know, treat this like any other digital transformation program, it has to change management element to it will have to champion this thing, you know, those kinds of things and make sure that the employees are very comfortable embracing this technology in their day to day life, you know, and we cannot just dump technology for the sake of it right, we have to take the humans along with the biggest mistake one can do is is to be you know, is to kind of see this as a technology deployment, it’s really not a technology deployment. It is really a change in a business practice. It is a change in the way we do things, in terms of how we service our customers, how we actually make decisions in some of the critical processes, which involve documents, that’s what we should see. And technology is just enabling. So it’s really not a technology led thing. It is more a business led thing. I think that’s very important to position it as a business-led thing.

Loraine Lawson
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