Each day, more and more manual processes are disappearing as businesses hasten to transition and undergo a total metamorphosis into a truly digital version of themselves. While trailblazing the world in so many other respects, the financial multiverse is lagging behind in the race to ditch paper.
That’s because banks face a unique and distinct challenge: from in-branch applications for accounts, loans and other services, to cheques and monthly payments, a significant part of their day-to-day operations remains mired in paper and manual, tedious processes.
Still, there are obsolete legacy processes that undergo the oppressively onerous task of name match, address match and face match manually for verification and authentication purposes, causing trepidation and inconvenience to both bank employees and consumers. Enter, OCR Technology.
What is OCR?
Although traditional scanning methods do not help beyond archiving documents, the banking industry, fortunately, has a very powerful tool at its disposal that serves as a catalyst to help meet the key objective of digitization-that is, making data available on paper digitally accessible for many different purposes.
The technological process of optical character recognition, or OCR, goes beyond scanning by capturing and transforming the text content on documents into digital text. A subset of machine vision technology, optical character recognition identifies written or printed letters and characters and reproduces them digitally for use in other applications.
It is installed in a system that is equipped with a camera that can produce high-resolution images of paper documents in order to convey data or information accurately. The algorithm accomplishes this difficult task by scanning and recognising letters and characters by shape and reproducing them in a digital, machine-readable format in the order specified.
Perfios provides the best in industry KYC Optical Character Recognition (OCR) API. This ready-to-use API recognizes and extracts data from popular OVDs saving time and eliminating manual error. The extracted data may further be used for authentication.
Use Cases of Perfios OCR technology
Let’s explore the use cases of Perfios state-of-the-art OCR solutions:
Customer Acquisition
The initial touchpoint, the onboarding process, is when the customer gets the first-hand impression and experience of the bank, which in turn provides the bank with the chance to impress and delight them for the first time, which could very well translate to their perception of the subsequent steps and set the tone for the client’s ongoing experience with the bank.
It is also a critical compliance step for gathering and collating the paramount Know Your Customer (KYC) data for the ongoing maintenance and management of the account.
You can just imagine the joy on the faces of the customers when they discover they can provide all the necessary information with just an image captured by the device, rather than filling out hundreds of forms and supplying a plethora of documents, which are more susceptible to being lost in transit.
KYC OCR provides cognitive solutions that captures the name and address, and converts it into digital, machine-readable format but also facilitates name match, address match, etc.
Additionally, Perfios’ KYC OCR helps prevent fraudsters from intruding into the bank’s ecosystem by detecting documents that have been altered where documents appear blurry and indeterminable or the document appears incomplete due to cuts at various points, or are mere fake photocopies of the original documents. This ensures legitimate customer onboarding.
Following the document extraction process as part of Perfios’ KYC OCR, the document validation process matches customer profiles with the data retrieved from OVD cards with the data retrieved from application forms with relevant confidence scores based on the accuracy and completeness of the match.
Merchant Onboarding
The process of entering account numbers and IFSC codes is slow, cumbersome, and tedious when a merchant is applying for a loan, onboarding on an aggregator platform, or any other merchant onboarding journey. Perfios Cheque OCR API lets customers upload or scan a cheque and capture the relevant account information such as account number and IFSC code and concoct an instant digital presence for them.
The process is particularly useful for NBFCs and payment platforms that need elaborate and detailed bank account information to configure their payment systems for online merchants and distribution partners to facilitate and conduct seamless monetary transactions for the purchase and supply of goods and services between the merchants or between the merchant and the end-consumer.
With Perfios Bank Account Verification API, you can offer a smooth and instant onboarding experience by onboarding customers with their cancelled cheques, digitizing the bank account number and IFSC code using OCR technology, and Perfios will verify the account details by submitting Re 1 to the beneficiary’s account and receiving the account holder’s name as per bank records and verifying the information.
Provide Perfios with a cancelled cheque and we’ll digitize the following details for you accurately: Name of the account holder and account number, Bank name, address and IFSC code, Date of Issue, MICR cheque number and MICR code
With ITR-V OCR, the relevant details in the Income Tax Returns Verification files can be accessed to assess the borrower’s income, financial stability, and creditworthiness when granting them a loan and determining their terms. A Form 16 OCR can yield an unambiguous picture of a person’s creditworthiness by retrieving information about the employer’s tax deductions and thereby determining the employee’s salary and other expenses.
Applicant’s Details
Applicants may feel daunted or discouraged by the application forms with their endless fields to fill out. KYC OCR, Form 16 OCR, Cheque OCR, and ITR-V OCR allow customers to pre-populate their information, alleviating their burden and providing a delightful customer experience. As most of the fields are pre-populated, dropout rates are lower, since there are very few blank fields to fill out.
Video-KYC Process
Video KYC is a customer identification and due diligence process that enables banks and other financial institutions to perform customer KYC remotely by undertaking an encrypted audio-visual interaction with the customer to obtain and verify identification information. It is the only method available to execute a full KYC remotely.
Perfios’ Video-KYC can be done remotely from anywhere. The only requirements are an internet connection and documents readily available to you. During the audio-visual interaction, you would be flawlessly directed to show the necessary documents and the embedded, printed or written text in the documents will be captured and transformed into a legible, machine-readable format.
Before the interaction, you will be asked to fill in personal details, and during the exchange, those details will be authenticated with the relevant information available on the document imbibed into the system through the OCR feature for identity verification.
Benefits of Perfios OCR technology
The use cases give us an idea about the immeasurable benefits of Perfios OCR technology. Let’s discuss some of the benefits:
Process Automation and Cost Reduction
This time-consuming and tedious process of collecting and collating KYC information from a variety of documents and manually entering these pertinent details in a stored database is entirely replaced by a state-of-the-art optical character recognition technology that not only captures and converts the text into a machine-readable format but also saves and stores the data without manual intervention, eliminating the need for manual data entry, thereby saving time and energy.
When compared with stacking sheets in a tray for batch OCR processing, the price of having someone seated at a computer terminal inserting data character-by-character is incomparably higher. You may reach out to Perfios’ business team for batch processing.
In addition, from the customer’s perspective, filling out a multitude of forms, providing a considerable amount of documentation, and visiting the branch physically results in frequent trips back and forth between the branch and the customer.
The Video-KYC application, equipped with OCR Technology, replaces it, where the customer is onboarded remotely by providing the documents during the audiovisual interaction, where the documents are automatically photographed and relevant details are captured, uncovered and digitized with OCR technology. Transit costs are eliminated, resulting in huge savings, and the authentication and validation process is wholly automated.
As a result of Digital Onboarding powered by OCR, the burden and enormous costs of maintaining best-in-class hard copy submissions and cluttering bank shelves with files that are unlikely to be used again can be replaced by little more than a few bytes on a computer, with the price of the computer being the only investment needed to store all the files. Additionally, OCR eliminates costly errors that are prone to human error.
There is no need for humans to physically search and extract data, as even that can be automated. Ultimately, OCR facilitates cost reductions associated with printing, copying, shipping, and filing and retrieving paper records.
Superior Performance
The average latency period of Perfios’ KYC OCR is a mere 3-4 seconds. That is the time from when the document is uploaded to the time it takes to furnish the relevant information embedded in the document is mere 4 seconds. The service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Also, employees will be able to devote their attention to improving and enhancing the core operations of the bank, rather than on trivial, perfunctory tasks, resulting in greater productivity.
Using KYC OCR, documents such as passports, Aadhaar cards, and voter identification cards are automatically recognized without manual intervention. Furthermore, despite having many templates tailored to each state, we can extract driving license information from almost all states.
The KYC OCR tool also has various quality check toggle buttons that must be selected if various quality checks are required to be applied to the documents. KYC OCR detects black and white, greyscale documents to eliminate spurious and fake copies.
Blurred and indeterminate documents can also be flagged. In addition, it can identify tampered or incorrect documents such as cuts at various points. The brightness score can serve as a true-life indicator of the validity and authenticity of a document, as images whose brightness is considerably below the threshold are considered suspicious and may require further investigation. It also provides confidence scores to gauge OCR accuracy.
As it does not require any manual input, it avoids the typical errors of humans, which results in enhanced accuracy and superior performance.
Enhanced Data Security
Is it easier to steal a file folder or a cloud database? A file folder stores the whole gamut of data on paper. You only need to get your hands on it, steal it and take it away without raising a hair’s width of suspicion or getting caught. To use this data for malicious purposes, all you need to do is read and understand it, unless it has been encoded and encrypted, which is never the case with hard copies.
Cloud storage, on the other hand, is not physical. It’s not merely something that you can pick up and take with you. To get it, a thief must:
- Locate it
- Come up with an incredibly smart way to access it
- Move or copy it
As if that wasn’t enough, they need to decrypt it, which is virtually impossible without a key. Cloud-based services such as SaaS, usually use an encryption key to encode data. Without the key, the data is worthless. Either the service or the individual user holds the key. Typically, a service provider holds the key and only allows access to verified users.
Aadhaar card is unarguably the most important identification document required to avail any government and other services such as opening a bank account or investing in any government scheme among others.
Hence in order to eliminate the risk of misuse and keep the identity of the Aadhaar holder safe, KYC OCR tools provide the option to mask the first 8 digits of the Aadhaar card or even all the 12 digits of the Aadhaar card using the OCR service, after extracting the relevant information from the image of the Aadhaar card. This ensures that even if the card falls into the wrong hands, it cannot be misused.
Convertibility into a whole lot of formats
Through OCR, text is transformed into a very usable form. This text can then be used in a variety of ways.
KYC documents can be uploaded in a variety of formats including JPEG, JPG, PNG, PDF, TIFF as a file, as a file B64, or even as an URL. The output would be in the same format as the input
Unlike a scanned document which is merely an image file, OCR text is character-by-character, which becomes words and collections of words. And this permits conversion into various formats such as searchable JPEG, JPG, PNG, PDF, TIFF.
This is highly pertinent as through software integrations, data can be shared across different tools. Hence, it is necessary that the information embedded in these documents is searchable as and when to pull out key data, thereby alleviating the burden of browsing and flipping through a plethora of documents to extract the relevant information.
Conclusion
The extent of the use of OCR is unimaginable. It is an essential cog in the machine of any banking automation. Perfios OCR integrates seamlessly into your existing workflow, so there are no interruptions or changes to your organization’s functioning. By enhancing and improving the current legacy processing, significant costs can be saved, productivity can improve, and revenues can increase.
