This month on our blog, we discussed how intelligent capture software is changing the way people experience banking. As we wrote, intelligent capture reduces some of the greatest pain points regarding customers, improving their experience and overall satisfaction in retail banks.
However, there’s another key benefit intelligent capture (IC) provides to banks, and that’s reduced costs. Taking full advantage of an intelligent capture platform can lead to tremendous savings. In fact, cognitive applications will yield productivity improvements in excess of $60 billion annually for US enterprises by 2020.
Why is that? Because 80-90 percent of all data received by financial institutions is unstructured, meaning people need to process it – and we’re prone to making errors. Artificial intelligence allows capture platforms to automate much of that processing, and it’s getting more efficient every year. The digitization of documents and automation of processing data leads to multiple cost savings.
Data Entry and Document Management
Without intelligent capture, bank employees spend a significant portion of each day handling documents, whether that’s paperwork brought in by customers or email attachments. Some employees spend more than 30 percent of their day handling documents in the form of scanning, faxing, emailing, or sending them to other departments.
With intelligent capture, documents are digitized as soon as they enter the branch, and from there they can be easily tracked and delivered to the proper department. Employees can digitize documents exactly when they arrive and in any format. Rather than having to scan a document, email it to yourself, save it to your computer, and then figure out where it needs to go, intelligent capture eliminates all but the first step. Simply scan the document, then intelligent capture will determine the next actions using its primary elements.
Furthermore, intelligent capture can handle data extraction from these scanned documents, saving your employees valuable time which they used to manually enter data. Instead, the employee will simply verify the correct information, adding context as needed. Ultimately, intelligent capture does not take the place of your employees; it simply removes tedium from their days, allowing them to focus on more high-value tasks like taking care of customers and reaching out to prospects.
Courier Costs and Intra-Office Mail
Many banks that receive paper documents have a courier system to pick up the documents on a regular basis and take them to a central facility where they are processed. This is a slow, expensive process with several steps, especially if you have several branches with long distances between them.
Intelligent capture allows the branches to go paperless, greatly reducing and sometimes even removing the cost of courier and intra-office services. With intelligent capture, all documents are scanned and digitized in the branch, after which they can be recycled or given back to the customer immediately. This not only saves costs, but it’s also better for the environment, and it speeds up processing times since documents no longer need to spend days in transit.
Savings for the Back Office
Without intelligent capture, banks employ teams of people to manually sort through documents, ensuring everything is properly done – properly submitted, signed, and notarized. After that, they read the documents and manually enter data into the system. This process is slow and prone to errors – humans typically incorrectly process 5 to 10 percent of all data.
With artificial intelligence and intelligent capture working as one, 90 percent of data can be automatically extracted off unstructured documents using machine learning. This results in fewer hours spent manually reviewing documents, allowing you to change the roles of your team from data entry to exception processing – that is, reviewing documents that AI cannot read on its own. Not only does this reduce the rate of errors, it frees up your employees to work on higher priority tasks.
In other words, with intelligent capture, your business can be productive and serve customers well.
Hidden Costs: Regulatory, Compliance, Audits
Many banks overlook this, but it’s a vital component of doing business. Auditors and regulators frequently review document management practices and test the controls in place to ensure compliance with various laws and regulations. Without intelligent capture, it’s difficult to accurately store and index documents, making it difficult to programmatically find the required documents. Also, it’s a slow and laborious process to track down documents, especially paper documents.
When you use intelligent capture, you’re always confident that you’ll have a paper trail of how documents are handled, allowing you to easily find the ones requested by any auditors or regulators.
If you’re ready to see how intelligent capture can help you and your business reduce costs and improve customer experience, let’s talk.