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Year in review and looking ahead: leading the charge in document automation and analysis for lenders

28 Dec 2023
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As 2023 comes to a close, we’re reflecting on a year full of growth and innovation. Amid a challenging and uncertain macroeconomic environment, financial services companies this year were focused on reducing fixed costs and improving their ability to scale their business sustainably.

At Ocrolus, we’ve introduced new offerings, expanded our use cases and advanced our technology throughout the year to meet these needs and ensure our customers have the efficiency, accuracy and flexibility they need to reach their objectives through AI-powered document automation.

Becoming the one-stop shop for AI-powered financial document automation

In the past year, artificial intelligence became a focus for nearly every industry as companies scrambled to find where technology like generative AI fit (or, in some instances, didn’t) within their business plans. However, while generative AI grabbed headlines worldwide, the breadth of AI technologies and use cases extends far beyond chatbots and out-of-the-box demos

In the financial sector, AI requires customization, accuracy and scale. While generative AI plays a role in the document automation technology stack, without a cohesive package of multiple technologies working together, users can experience errors, inefficiencies and incomplete solutions.

Harnessing the power of the best AI technologies and tailoring them for specific financial use cases has been a primary focus of Ocrolus for years. We’ve been building our models, leveraging open-source and vendor products and constantly testing the bleeding edge of technology so that our customers can experience the benefits of this wave of innovation by partnering directly with Ocrolus. We’re dedicated to providing a one-stop shop for financial document automation so our customers don’t need to navigate the vast, complex AI marketplace for piecemeal solutions.

With more than 300 million pages of documents processed using Ocrolus technology, we’ve built an unparalleled library of training data to inform proprietary AI models, which today support more than 1600 types of financial, legal and personal identification documents. With hundreds of document types added monthly, our one-stop shop continually adds new use cases, from more complex mortgage applications to other financial functions like tax preparation.

Advancing machine-only offerings for future-focused lenders

With best-in-class technology and a massive volume of training data, Ocrolus’ automation capabilities reached the point in 2023 where we introduced Instant, an AI-powered, machine-only service offering faster financial decision-making.

Powered by AI, Instant empowers lenders to analyze bank statements and other financial documents in seconds, processing documents more efficiently than ever before. This machine-only solution is a complementary service to Ocrolus’ Complete offering, which includes human data verification for lower-quality documents. The two offerings can be used in tandem, simplifying and completely automating the document analysis process with over 99% accuracy.

machine-only offerings for future-focused lenders

Using Ocrolus’ Instant and Complete offerings together provides the best comprehensive solution for document needs. We’re seeing our customers make better underwriting decisions swiftly, bringing decisions from days to minutes while having greater confidence and uniformity in the data and insights.

Automating complex income calculations for mortgage lenders

In the mortgage vertical, one of the common challenges for lenders this year was an increasing number of borrowers with non-traditional income sources. We launched an enhanced Ocrolus dashboard specifically for the mortgage industry to address this.

With tailor-made solutions for the mortgage industry, lenders can create new efficiencies in the origination process by automating a significant portion of their workflow. From classifying documents and capturing data to analyzing data and streamlining income calculations, the enhanced Ocrolus dashboard empowers underwriters with AI, helping them balance quick turnarounds and thorough, accurate risk assessments.

We also realize that adding another tool to the tech stack of a mortgage lender can be confusing for underwriters and loan officers, so we’ve embedded our solution directly into the Encompass LOS, providing a seamless experience for Encompass users. 

These gains in efficiency allow underwriters to focus on the nuances that require human judgment. With AI expertise, underwriters can prepare for the future and stand out by underwriting higher-quality loans more quickly.

Fraud detection improvements

Detect, our fraud detection capability, was launched in 2022 as a revolutionary solution to uncover fraud and mitigate losses proactively. In 2023, we introduced more than ten key upgrades to give customers peace of mind and continually enhance their ability to identify threats. The rapid evolution of Ocrolus’ fraud detection capabilities demonstrates our unique ability to adapt quickly, benefiting from our extensive lender network and dataset. This helps our partners stay ahead of complex fraud schemes that are continually evolving.

Our latest update in fraud detection is the Detect Authenticity Score, which provides a holistic view of a document’s authenticity, weighing the context of what was tampered with and our confidence in the signals.

A bright future for AI in financial services

As we look ahead to 2024, we are still in the early innings of reaching AI’s full potential for document automation. We’re continuing to automate as much as possible within the financial document review process to free up users’ time for more strategic work. Our vision for the future is bright, and with a focus on accuracy, efficiency and flexibility, we see the potential for AI-driven processes to become the norm. In contrast, manual review becomes the exception for only the lowest quality documents.

Driven by our state-of-the-art AI technology and continually growing AI training data, we’re finding new use cases to apply our technology in other financial services, from tax preparation to even more complex mortgage applications. In a time when AI advances seem unbounded, the winners will be those companies with the data and the subject matter expertise to apply these innovations to real-world problems, and that’s what Ocrolus is constantly delivering to its customers.

Book your demo today to learn how Ocrolus can help bring accuracy, efficiency and flexibility to your financial decision-making in the coming year.

Key takeaways:
  • In financial services, effective AI requires customization and accuracy at scale. Ocrolus provides a one-stop shop for financial document automation so customers don’t need to navigate the complex marketplace for piecemeal solutions.
  • Ocrolus introduced several new capabilities and offerings in 2023, including Instant, a machine-only service for faster financial decision-making; an enhanced mortgage dashboard empowering underwriters to balance efficiency with accurate risk assessments; and the Detect Authenticity Score, which simplifies fraud reviews into a single metric.
  • As AI advances, we expect new use cases for document automation in financial services, helping drive process efficiency and flexibility with an automation-first approach.