Customer onboarding in the digital age has only just begun because COVID-19 restrictions have shifted all banking-related activities online. A study found that up to 82% of customers between the ages of 18 and 24 carry out all of their banking tasks on their mobile devices. Financial institutions must adapt to this digitization as it becomes more and more influential.
Even though client onboarding is now a digital process, data entry still needs a sizable amount of laborious staff. And doing it securely, safely, and without making mistakes is getting harder and harder. The job of a compliance officer is very demanding in this regard. Optical Character Recognition or OCR screening can help in this case. This technology extracts information from camera images, image-only PDFs, and scanned documents.
OCR Screening – How Does It Function?
OCR software enables the automatic data collection from all kinds of text-containing documents. An OCR API can be very helpful in automating the reading and checking of documents, which is typically the duty of clerks. The OCR screening technology can scan any document containing information about a potential client. It automatically extracts the text it needs after recognizing it. Firms use this extracted data as required by feeding it to any database, tool, or system for additional processing.
Data Extraction from Identity Documents
OCR screening technology works correctly and consistently in real-time. It can read many different alphabets. The OCR compliance system detects the identity image to comply with KYC regulations and automatically normalizes the ID photo. The system crops and downscales the document image on the device after taking it and sends it to the OCR server for processing. The OCR server converts the required document’s portion into text and calculates a confidence score for every field. A safe, unique biometric template is created using the document holder’s portrait image and used for comparison.
Advantages of OCR Screening
The novel OCR solutions just change the hectic and boring task of data entry in just a matter of time. Some of its benefits are as follows:
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Faster Customer Onboarding
Manual data entry slows down account opening and onboarding processes. This tactic restricts the new business opportunities that a company gets. Additionally, firms run the risk of interfering with the registration process in the consumer sales cycle. OCR allows for the automatic capture and extraction of personal data from any type of identity paper. Employing an OCR screening solution eliminates the need to manually copy and compare personal information with document data. Consequently, the customer onboarding process becomes faster, and clients and workers are as well. The OCR screening system just scans the document, saves the data, and verifies it in a couple of seconds.
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Cost Saving
Following on from the last point concerning physical work, speed isn’t the only element that influences businesses. Manually verifying papers and extracting data puts a load on the company’s budget. By implementing OCR screening technology, organizations can either save costs or reassign human resources to even more relevant tasks.
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Better Efficiency and Accuracy
By eliminating the human aspect of this process, companies are ultimately limiting the margin for error. OCR screening technology automates the process to ensure a consistent outcome with no irregularities. But when it comes to efficiency, there is a lot to discuss. First and foremost, firms are removing a major source of stress, which is translation. Compliance teams were not only required to actually extract data from official papers but they were also obligated to pass it on to qualified translators. This was necessary to guarantee that every word was translated accurately. Optical character recognition enables everyone to immediately search, translate, and digitize, material into the selected language.
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Absence of Backlogs
Existing commercial customer connections and related documents must also be evaluated on a regular basis as anti-money laundering regulations become more stringent. Existing papers are checked for correctness utilizing OCR technology, and if one is missing, the client may be requested to submit a replacement. In other words, if documents go missing, an automated message can be sent to the client, prompting them to provide them later. These automated process phases ensure that documents are constantly up to date, reducing backlogs and employee burden dramatically.
Conclusion
While scanning historical newspapers during the early 1990s, OCR screening technology became popular. But since then, technology has advanced significantly. Today’s systems are capable of delivering near-perfect OCR accuracy. Prior to the availability of OCR technology, the only way to electronically format papers was to physically retype the text. OCR technology now covers every business in the current day. It assists businesses in optimizing their data extraction methods with high accuracy and real-time results. Using OCR software, the banking industry, online payment systems, e-commerce, and many others can extract customer data from any type of paper in seconds. This reduces the expenses associated with manual data entry and tedious data collection techniques.
