Automated Document Classification: Let Your EIM Solution Work for You

‘Automation’ made our list as a top 4 takeaway from 2020 for banks and credit unions. Automation drives efficiency, which translates into faster access to information, and ultimately enables better services. With so many unknowns today, standing out by delivering value to your customers and members as a true partner will grow engagement and loyalty in the new year.

But how? Automation is a broad term, every FI’s workflow is different, data volumes are surging, and there are countless layouts of documents received each day – even within the same institution. Although an increasing number of documents originate in a digital form with an accompanying digital signature, many legal or procedural documents are still paper, completed by hand, and signed with a wet signature. Regardless of format, all documents and the data contained within need to be handled consistently downstream, and be made searchable and retrievable.

Capturing data and leveraging its value.

Your institution’s flexibility around handling these various document formats is directly linked to leveraging your information management system and using it as a true resource.

Once in digital form, document analysis is required to automate the curation of electronic content, beginning with the basic ability to extract data.  Native digital documents present the easiest format from which to do so – they are easily interrogated to determine their class or type, and glean key values for storage, search, and retrieval. 

Image PDFs and other scanned files, like those containing a wet signature, have the added complexity of requiring optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR).  These capabilities allow the solution to digitally “read” the document so that context applicable data can be automatically located and extracted, making the information indexable, searchable, and retrievable. Further processing and workflows can also be triggered – all without an employee’s intervention, driving business processes and streamlining operations. 

Gaining flexibility and speed with advanced tools.

Key attributes of the document, like its layout and contents, are analyzed to identify its type - for example, is it a change of address form or a loan application? It’s no surprise that classification solutions that process documents regardless of their digital medium offer the most opportunity to realize efficiencies and limit the need for human review, speeding access to the information, and removing error-prone manual sorting or routing.

But what happens when modifications, new layouts or form types are introduced into the workflow? Historically an employee would need to learn the new document and understand its “next steps” for a manual handoff. In legacy content management systems, this would also result in a failure as the document would not match the established template or known document type.

Today however, information management solutions allow for the digital learning of these new forms just like a human would have done in the past, enabling real-time remediation and exception handling. Training the solution and leveraging machine learning capabilities can continually improve the efficiency of the classification and extraction engines, allowing banks and credit unions to process non-template driven workflows, gaining the flexible to process newly introduced layouts quickly – decreasing and often eliminating downtime.

The Springboard
The ability to automatically classify and index documents supplements the robust business functionality of FASTdocs, Alogent’s enterprise content and information management platform (ECM/EIM).  Leveraging AI and machine learning, FASTdocs delivers fast downstream processes like triggering advanced workflows, notifying account holders of expired documents, and enabling real-time access to third party integrators.

Technology that enables continuously improving machine learning capabilities and robust integrations throughout the entire digital ecosystem ensures your institution benefits from fast access to information through automated classification and indexing, and the ability to leverage this data for better and more personalized services. 

Learn more about leveraging EIM solutions for enterprise-wide automation. Click here for a free eBook.

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