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The demand for OCR Technology increasing for ID Verification

Ashley Williams
October 26, 2018
5 minutes read
1483

ID verification is core to overall identity verification services that help business around the globe to authenticate their users and identity credential provided by these customers. Fraud prevention and online identity theft protection strategies of online companies rest upon reliable KYC verification that in turn rely on authentic ID verification. But most of the KYC industry has made it difficult to perform ID verification with multiple checks being performed in addition to a substantial amount of time being lost in manual data entry by end-users for their identity credentials. Not to mention, the amount of time spent on each verification not only reduces the client onboarding time but also makes it hard for companies to maintain a superior service standard. After all, what good is an ID verification service, that actually leads to the decline of service standards maintained by a certain company? OCR technology, thus, is considered an ideal alternative to otherwise laborious manual data entry process that precedes the identity verification process.

What is OCR Technology?

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. In a layman’s term, OCR is a technology that can identify and read the text from a printed document. Most of the advanced OCR technology solutions have the ability to even identify written characters from a hand-written note.

OCR Technology for ID verification

As you can imagine, ID verification services using OCR technology for reading the credentials from an official document can solve the issue of time-consuming ID verification process. But the complication to develop such a complex technology is also there. Shufti Pro, on the other hand, already has developed its KYC verification and ID verification services on Artificial Intelligence technology. It was easier for Shufti Pro to offer an identity verification solution based on OCR technology and we are calling it InstantCapture Solution. It enables our customers to perform identity verification and KYC verification of their own customers in a swift and hassle-free manner. But checks are also in place, to ensure that only the accurate information is forwarded by end-users for verification processing even after OCR technology has done its job.

InstantCapture – An Introduction

Shufti Pro offered its identity verification services with a turnaround time of 30-60 seconds and verification results being displayed in real-time. But in order to even reduce the turn-around time to virtually zero, OCR technology was integrated into the verification process of Shufti Pro, giving rise to a new solution – InstantCapture.

Available both in offsite as well as onsite verification mode, InstantCapture works either way. It means whether Shufti Pro collects personal information from end-user or if its customers have already collected it from end-users and just want to verify that information, InstantCapture works perfectly in both scenarios.

How does Identity verification work with OCR?

Normally an official identity document is required for the purpose of online identity verification. Shufti Pro’s Instant Capture solution has the ability to identify characters on an official document. So, once an end-user or a Shufti Pro customer forwards a document image to the verification system, OCR technology of Shufti Pro will identify each charactor on the official document and automatically fill the personal information, something that has to be done manually in case of an ordinary identity verification. So OCR technology makes ID verification to be performed not only quickly but also through a system that is trusted by a global client base of Shufti Pro.

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Even after Shufti Pro, auto-fills the personal information form with client information extracted from official ID, that personal information form is shown to end-user or Shufti Pro customer for validation. If there is any case of faulty extraction or some credential details missed by OCR, Shufti Pro customer or end-user can edit the personal information. Only the information form confirmed to be correct is forwarded for verification. So, it will be correct to say that OCR technology for ID verification is there to help Shufti Pro customers and end-users from spending even 30-60 seconds on identity verification services. For now, Shufti Pro is offering OCR based data extractions free of cost to its customers.

Benefits of OCR for ID Verification

Shufti Pro is a highly customized identity verification solution that is built to provide ease of use not only to its customers but end-users as well. So, it allows the choice of OCR technology for ID verification not only to its customers but end-users as well, only if opted by Shufti Pro customers.

OCR technology for ID verification makes the entire verification hands free with minimum input required from end-users. Similar data protection and privacy protocols are applicable to OCR technology and InstaCapture Solution as any other KYC service or AML solution from Shufti Pro. Although, usual identity verification services offer global language coverage even the InstantCapture Solution with OCR technology has broad language support with the ability to identify characters from a diverse list of languages that are commonly spoken in the world e.g. Italian, English, French and Spanish etc. Shufti Pro Back office will hold proof of verification for its customers to view the number of customers that used OCR technology for verification and the effective performance of InstantCapture solution in creating a reliable customer base for Shufti Pro clients.

Disclaimer: No warranty is herein provided that the information contained in this document is accurate, up-to-date, and/or complete. In no circumstance(s), does such information constitute legal or any other advice. Any person who intends to use, rely, pass-on, or re-publish the information contained herein in any way is solely responsible for the same. We suggest to verify the information and/or obtain expert advice independently if required.

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Entering into the fourth industrial revolution, business processes are shifted to the digital sphere. The concept of “physical presence” to get work done is now blurring. Remote working is trending all across the globe and so is the automation. The work that was once done by humans is now being replaced by machines. In upcoming years we are going to see this notion gaining grounds more than ever.

It is no longer a secret that in this era, banks and other financial institutions are struggling to evolve continuously to enhance their operations and providing their customers with an exceptional experience to strive in a competitive market. The banking industry is facing immense pressure to boost its efficiency and utilize the resources effectively in an optimized way.

The challenge to optimize cost and enhance efficiency while balancing security and customer experience is driving the adoption of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the banking industry.

The Power of RPA in banking

RPA in banking is mostly concerned with the use of automated software to build an AI workforce and virtual assistants to maximize efficiency and reducing operational costs. RPA in the banking industry is quickly evolving since it serves as a useful tool to address the increasing business demands and optimize resources with the help of service-through-software models.

In order to successfully embrace this technology, institutions must adopt a strategic and well-researched approach. The potential growth of RPA in banking is expected to be worth $2.9 billion by 2022, as compared to $250 million in 2016. It shows that in upcoming years, machines, systems, and bots will be executing the majority of the tasks, hence, expanding the capacity and providing the workforce an opportunity to focus on higher-value tasks.

Over the past few years, the regulations around financial institutes have become more stringent than ever. Banks and other financial institutes are reported to spend more than $321 billion on their compliance operations and the fines faced due to violations, and nearly $270 billion on just compliance operations; in the last decade.

With time, the operating expenses are rising and the stringent regulations impose hefty regulatory fines. This results in slow processes and brand damage leading to poor customer experience. Hiring more people to find new solutions to manage operations while cutting down operational costs is not a reliable answer. The solution has to have the ability to efficiently balance everything; i.e. Robotic process automation.

Integrating RPA enables banks and financial institutions to lesses manual efforts, mitigate risks, offer more reliable compliance and most importantly enhance the overall customer experience. It assists the banking industry in processing operations that are repetitive in nature. Moreover, it increases productivity by engaging customers in real-time.

Though RPA is a comprehensive process that requires structured inputs, robust training, and governance but once implemented successfully, it can take complete control of the processes.
What are the advantages of implementing RPA in the banking industry?

The banking industry is often considered the most crucial industry because of its extensive and hectic business operations and the involvement of regulatory authorities. Implementing RPA helps the banking sector in the following ways

It helps financial institutes to make their process faster, productive and efficient.

It facilitates banks to focus on innovative strategies for a successful business by reducing manual effort and freeing them from their mundane tasks.

RPA helps banks in saving 20% to 50% of their cost and time.

Whether it is about reducing manual errors or achieving accuracy, RPA can automate functions eliminating the errors and completing tasks timely.

It helps financial institutes for adequate risk and compliance reporting.

The implementation of RPA in banking sectors doesn’t require any change in infrastructure because of UI automation capabilities.

The cloud-based RPA solutions reduce integration and hardware costs.

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4 Significant use-cases of RPA in Banking

Robotic process automation is serving financial institutes in multiple ways. Some of the use cases are as following

Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding is the most critical and time-taking process in financial institutions because multiple documents require manual verification. The identity verification solutions – a domain of RPA – are adopted by multiple institutions to streamline their onboarding processes. These solutions based on AI and machine learning principles make the whole process contactless and friction-free by automating te steps.

AI-powered document verification services integrate optical character recognition (OCR) technology to automatically extract the data from the documents and populating the form. The captured information is then verified against the user-provided information. If the verification is successful, the data is automatically entered into the customer management portal.

Automating customer onboarding through ID verification not only eliminate manual errors but also saves a lot of time and effort put in by the employees and customers. RPA has made customer onboarding a real-time frictionless process done within seconds.

Know your customer (KYC)

After the incident of 9/11, the regulations around financial institutes are continuously evolving and becoming more stringent. Initially introduced as a part of the US Patriot Act 2001, KYC requirements have become obligatory for every institute dealing with money. Banks being the primary source of funds transfer are continuously under the radar of watchdogs.

Since both KYC and AML are purely data-intensive processes, RPA is most suitable for them. The customer identification program (CIP) is one of the fundamentals of the KYC process. With the help of identity and document verification, the real identity of an individual can be verified and ensured. Moreover, RPA helps organizations in anomaly detection, i.e. suspicious transactions in real-time hence, hindering fraudulent transactions.

The implementation of RPA is very effective for financial institutes in terms of saving time and cost as compared to traditional KYC processes that take around weeks and immense manual effort.

Automatic Report Generation

Risk and compliance reporting is a key operation of every financial institution. The banks are obliged to generate compliance reports for fraudulent transactions in the form of suspicious activity reports (SARs). Conventionally, the compliance officers and dedicated teams are responsible for the manual generation of reports. And that makes reporting a repetitive task requiring too much time and effort.

RPA applications based on AI principles can read and process the lengthy compliance documents and automatically extract the required information populating the SAR forms with the help of OCR technology. In fact, for more optimized reporting, the system can be trained with multiple inputs to efficiently process the various parts of the report.

This eventually reduces the operational costs, human efforts and saves the time consumed to successfully perform the task.

Account Opening

Just like customer onboarding, RPA has made the account opening process convenient, quick and accurate. It eliminates the transcription errors between the banking system and new account requests, which automatically improves the data quality of the system. Through RPA integration, multiple banks are using robots for their account opening process. What these robots do is fetch information from the forms and automatically fills data into different host applications.

Such automation results in swift, error-free, and quick data entry process. This results in reduced turnaround time and cost while enhancing the customer experience.

The demand for OCR Technology increasing for ID Verification

What is OCR Technology?

OCR Technology for ID verification

InstantCapture – An Introduction

How does Identity verification work with OCR?

Recommended For you: Why Identity Proofing is Important on Facebook and Other Social Media Websites?

Benefits of OCR for ID Verification

The Power of RPA in banking

4 Significant use-cases of RPA in Banking

Customer Onboarding

Know your customer (KYC)

Automatic Report Generation

Account Opening

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Dubai

The demand for OCR Technology increasing for ID Verification

What is OCR Technology?

OCR Technology for ID verification

InstantCapture – An Introduction

How does Identity verification work with OCR?

Recommended For you: Why Identity Proofing is Important on Facebook and Other Social Media Websites?

Benefits of OCR for ID Verification

The Power of RPA in banking

What are the advantages of implementing RPA in the banking industry?

4 Significant use-cases of RPA in Banking

Customer Onboarding

Know your customer (KYC)

Automatic Report Generation

Account Opening