4 Industries Where OCR Technology Can Work Wonders

Richard M.

January 13, 2021

6 minutes read

Today, online businesses need to meet the constantly evolving customer needs to survive market competition. In the highly digitised space where there is an influx of user data, having the appropriate technology is the need of the hour. Gone are the days when customers needed to reach a business’ office with their identity documents and take part in a tedious verification process. With Optical Character Recognition (OCR), customer onboarding can be performed remotely and with better turnaround times. Advanced OCR technology not only helps streamline the process at the user end but also helps businesses save the cost and time of investing in manual data entry tasks.

What is Optical Character Recognition?

OCR technology is used to convert textual, handwritten or image data into an electronic form. Online businesses use OCR to extract customer information from documents such as a driving licence, passport or national ID card. The information extracted can then be stored in a digital form to online databases for future use.

Industry Use Cases of OCR Technology

Banking Industry

Financial organisations like banks are a frequent consumer of OCR services because of the amount of paperwork in their daily operations. OCR can play a crucial role in Business Process Automation (BPA) systems which are an essential part of customer data processing. It can help perform easy and accurate data extraction of documents which simplifies banking procedures. Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) are one of the basic applications of OCR technology which recognise numbers on payment cards and process them digitally.

Another benefit of using this technology is that information provided on handwritten cheques can be scanned and managed without the hassle of entering data manually. The process incorporates important details like the name, address and signature of the users which are processed in real-time. With Artificial Intelligence bringing new innovation to the table, smart OCRs are replacing form processing, and other paperwork done by credit card processors. Merchant statement analytics, which takes long hours of verifying transactions and checking credit scores, can now be streamlined with accurate readings from AI-based OCR solutions.

Healthcare Sector

Hospitals and other organisations working in the medical sector have to work with a lot of paper-based patient records, health insurance forms, and medical policy statements. Keeping track of the large volume of data often becomes an uphill task for healthcare institutions. Optical Character Recognition provides a solution to this problem by converting data like patient profile, treatment history, insurance payments, and diagnostics into digitally accessible information. Once the information is changed to electronic form it can now be accessed anytime with ease. This gives healthcare providers the utility to better diagnose a patient by viewing their medical history through their electronic health record.

Apart from this, information extracted from the OCR engine is stored to cloud storage where it is kept secure and confidential. This helps medical service providers in the efficient management of patient records. Moreover, in the pharmaceutical sector, information related to a wide range of drugs could be digitally stored and retrieved from online databases with a single search operation, optimising time management.

Finance Industry

The Finance sector can greatly benefit from OCR solutions providing finance experts and accountants with the opportunity to focus on high priority tasks rather than processing information using old-school methods. Rather than focusing on manual data handling and processing, they can use OCR technology to automate operations which take longer turnaround times. This way financial organisations can bring better productivity and accuracy in their mechanical operations.

According to a report, digital businesses invest more than a billion dollars in preventing fraudulent activities. Blank and double receipts, transactions from non-banking entities, and adding more value to the actual expenses are ways and means through which cyber criminals deceive financial systems and forms. OCR helps mitigate these possible instances of financial frauds by integrating OCR management systems in mobile applications or web platforms which are used to perform financial activities.

With Optical Character Recognition, in-depth audits can be conducted with a faster turnover, allowing auditors to easily access budget reports and expense documents. Rather than reporting and collating every single detail, finance experts can spend more time on analysing details related to transactions.

Apart from this, OCR allows accountants to work remotely due to the level of accessibility they provide. By reducing the possibility of human error in reading invoices and financial statements of different formats, automated OCR solutions prove to be a good deal in the finance industry.

Insurance Industry

Unexpected delays can affect the customer experience of any organisation, and insurance firms are no exception. Manual entry of data becomes impossible when it comes to the length and volume of insurance policies and agreements. There is no solution except to go digital. Insurance companies can use OCR-based solutions to make their client onboarding process smooth and effective. By allowing customers to upload a copy of their insurance policy using a mobile application powered by OCR, insurance firms are banking on the right use of technology. Insurers can now sign contracts with customers by easily retrieving their information through searchable PDFs generated by OCR.

Shufti Pro’s OCR for Business

Data extraction and processing is the need of the hour for enterprises around the globe. Processing customer data in huge volumes can often become a challenge for online businesses in the finance, banking, insurance and healthcare sector.

Shufti Pro’s OCR for Business combines artificial intelligence to perform instant image to text conversion of paper-based documents into digital PDFs. The solution extracts information from a wide array of documents including handwritten, business records, official letters, and invoices etc. Shufti Pro’s OCR has multilingual support of over 150 languages with global coverage. With a remarkable accuracy of more than 90%, online businesses can efficiently optimise their customer data.

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