Finally, Fully Automated Exception Payment Processing

Today, Dec 2004 by Starble, Michael P

The reality of exception payment processing is that most remittance documents are not uniform, are highly unstructured, multi-page and oftentimes poor print quality. Truly automating these documents is a complex challenge.

The majority of wholesale lockbox and diversified financial services providers already own a retail or clean mail payment solution. Their existing supplier may offer some form of exception processing capability. The key question is will it achieve the levels of cost and process efficiency that customers are demanding to address their complex exceptions issues? Probably not. Reaching these objectives specifically means minimizing or eliminating operator intervention while maintaining rapid throughput and outstanding accuracy. What technology components should a customer look for to obtain such a solution? There are four key capabilities that must be present to deliver fully automated exception processing.

Open Architecture

A number of excellent scanning devices are now available to capture images in a complex remittance environment. Your environment may already have one of these devices or more likely a mixture. A robust exception processing solution should be able to "import" images from any capture device.

OPEN SCAN has developed a universal import/export function that not only imports images from any capture device but also "exports" data and images to any back end completion system including retail or wholesale applications. This open architecture, best-in-class approach provides significant solution design and cost flexibility.

Enhanced OCR

Highly accurate OCR is the first step in minimizing operator intervention. Industry standards for OCR accuracy are approximately 90%. Given the poor quality of many exception remittance forms and documents, 90% isn't good enough to insure highly automated data capture. Most exception processing solutions stumble when the source document has column lines, skewed data fields or is simply a poor photocopy. OPEN SCAN's enhanced OCR engine can read just about anything. Today our customers are realizing 99.89% accuracy on OCR reads alone.

Create Structure / Eliminate Operator Intervention

The next challenge for complex exception payment processing is the highly non-standard nature of remittance documents, meaning complex lists, check shirts, vouchers and correspondence. OPEN SCAN introduced "rope & zone" template design technology that creates "structure" for any type of unstructured document. Operators initiate this process by using a mouse or by simply keying the first few characters of information from a given zone of data on the document. The solution then utilizes OCR, ICR, OMR and/or Barcode to extract data from the template zone. OPEN SCAN is particularly well suited for complex payments that reoccur on a monthly basis. Some competitive approaches utilize historical matching that requires an operator to review the extracted data to see if it "matches" data from the previous month. This process is error prone. With OPEN SCAN, once the template structure is created, reoccurring payments will never require an operator to review again even if there are changes to the payment from month to month.

Intelligent Data & History Reconstruction

Creating structure for any type of non-standard document is a critical automation component but intelligent reconstruction is what turbo charges the accuracy and power of exception processing. OPEN SCAN'S reconstruction module integrates history with validation files such as customer or account records. This integration drives robotic error correction and enables the system to calculate incomplete values. Coupled with OPEN SCAN's Open Track archive module, comprehensive historical and transaction information is easily searchable and available for every employee that needs it.

True Exception Automation

Selecting the appropriate technology components for your exception payment processing solution will insure that a high percentage of remits are processed automatically and accurately without operator intervention or interference with existing legacy retail or wholesale solutions. The bottom line will be full automation of your complex exception payments and likely 50% or more in terms of realized cost efficiency.

Open Scan Technologies, Inc. pioneered exception payment processing in 2000. The company's exception payment modules are integrated with both retail and wholesale solutions within a wide range of industries including financial services, utilities, insurance and state government. The modules can also be combined to deliver turnkey exception payment solutions.

Open Scan Technologies, Inc.

1509 York Street, Denver, CO 80206-1408

Phone: 303-333-7444 * Fax: 303-333-1777

Website: www.openscantech.com

Michael P. Starble manages Business Development for Open Scan Technologies, Inc. He can be reached at 303-333-7444 ext 211 or via e-mail at: mstarble@openscantech.com.