So much to say.

Roth Automation and its President and CEO, Jonathan Roth, are proud to announce the launch of a new podcast focused on banking and financial institutions.  In 'The Process Teller', Jon will lead conversations with industry experts, decision makers, problem solvers, and automation adopters sharing insight into the challenges and opportunities faced by the industry.

In speaking about the podcast Roth explained, "Document, data, and conversational AI automation technologies deliver efficiency, speed, value and competitive advantage.  The Process Teller is a platform to open up this conversation to small and mid-sized regional banks who may be less informed."

Open the Vault

Jonathan Roth has over 30 years of experience in designing, deploying, and optimizing business automation processes for national and global banking institutions. Listen as he and his well-respected guests share the history, present, and future of navigating the everchanging aspects of banking automation. Learn more about Jon and Roth Automation in the Prologue episode available now at www.processteller.com.  Additional episodes will be coming soon and can be found on the website, iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and more.

Enjoy Jon's two-cents and sign up today for updates and notifications about the upcoming season.

Resigned Facts...Aren't Facts

Since the emergence of technology, there have been those who vilify automation, intimating that it will cause significant upheaval to the workforce and economy.  Mark Cuban was quoted as saying "Automation is going to cause unemployment" and Chieh Huang goes further to say "Automation is great for profits, but it's a real potential trouble area for society."

Cause and Effect

Recent events may change this narrative.  We are in the midst of what is being heralded as the "Great Resignation." While its origins are tied to a COVID 19 response, it has evolved into something greater.  Employees have determined a worth and value to their time:  Wages, personal freedom, conditions and the position’s alignment to long term goals must warrant the exerted effort.  If the job does not fulfill those needs, many have opted to vacate those positions.  Purpose and accomplishment are more valued than ever. Even in entry level positions, where compensation is a primary motivating factor, there is less desire to remain in a position driven by mindless tasks.

These tasks are exactly what automation is best suited for.  At its most basic, this technology is software being used to  execute tested and proven repetitive processes.  These tasks are often mundane, but vital to the operations of the company.

The trepidation around automation is derived by the myth/stereotype that it will eliminate jobs.  While this may be the result in some situations, the goal is to more effectively perform error prone, mindless tasks and free employees to perform value driven assignments.  To that end, what if the truth is that employees don't want to perform the repetitive tasks?  Is the “Great Resignation” a reification of the need for automation?

Give the People What they Want

Perhaps the real "trouble area for society," and the real onus to "cause unemployment" is the slow reaction of organizations to evolve or adopt technological advancements rather than the technology itself.  Mental and financial health are directly tied with job functions requiring greater responsibility.  If roles and wages align with workforce needs and desires, we can assume a return may follow.  If this is the case, automation could be just what is needed to improve employee engagement.

We need to get past the idea of "either/or" when it comes to automation and employees.  There is a place for both and a need for both.  Even those whose jobs it most effects are, in essence, illustrating endorsement of adoption by their actions. In fact, we may very well find that companies and employees alike may operate even better where they co-exist.

Why Roth Automation for Task Automation?

The Roth Automation team has decades of experience in Intelligent Process Automation solutions.  With strategic partners across a variety of technologies, the Roth Team works tirelessly to ensure the right solution for your individualized needs.  Offering Robotic Process Automation as a Service (RPAaaS), they aim to deploy solutions attainable to companies of all sizes.

Fear is a Roadblock to the Introduction of Automation

Some people fear change, some feel change is necessary, and others embrace change.  Often times all of these people exist within the confines of the same business, which causes friction.  The true challenge occurs when looking at standard operating procedures and processes.  Technology can be a great boon to productivity, but can often get lost in the minutiae when the introduction of technology is viewed as an 'all or nothing' decision.  This can be for many reasons, most commonly cost.  To rationalize the expense, you want to use the product to its fullest capability.  The problem lies in the instances where this rationale prevents the company from taking advantage of the benefits the technology has to offer.  Let's use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as an example.

RPA can be a massive undertaking, making it primarily a focus of enterprise level companies that typically have more budget and bandwidth.  Part of the reason that these resources become necessary is due to the fact that the companies are looking to hit the proverbial home run.  Businesses are encouraged to automate the processes of an entire department or company, such as Accounts Payable.  This can be daunting.  The rewards can be astounding, cutting the cost per invoice processed by a third.  The commitment of time and employees however, is not a possibility for many and thus the technology is lost as a competitive advantage. It doesn't have to be.  The technology can be used in a smaller capacity and still generate a great return.

Biting off More than you Can Chew is a Recipe for Automation Failure

Rather than the homerun, companies should recognize where a string of singles scores runs and still wins the game.  Businesses looking to introduce RPA can instead focus on one critical task, or the pain of one employee rather than the whole department/company.  The process being automated can be based in standard logic (if/when) before needing to include concepts like machine learning. This can alleviate the pressure of the larger project, while simultaneously allowing the team to get used to the concept and practice of automation.

This option becomes feasible with the emergence of Robotic Process Automation as a Service (RPAaaS).  Justification of the expense of many products would be unreasonable if the end goal was to start small and simple in this manner.  There is a good chance that the cost of the bot would exceed the cost of the task in its current form.  Where technology can discriminate against the small business, RPAaaS acts as an equalizer, allowing for a flexibility in the structure of cost and commitment.  The "as a service" model helps avoid the sting of high upfront licensing costs associated with ownership.  It also allows for ability to tackle tasks that are short term, seasonal, or simply part of a bigger plan without having the burden of either full purchase or even an annual commitment. This is possible at an investment level that nearly any company can palate.

RPAaaS in Action

While vast projects such as AP Automation are universal, it is harder to give a similar, generic, example of the type of process encouraged here. In the model suggested, the task is more functional, or a piece of the whole, as a more typical project would go.  Consider a situation where an employee of a particular office would start each day with the same task.  They would gather information through web searches and put the compiled data into a spreadsheet.  In this case, say it was competitor pricing (something increasingly popular in retail with guarantees of beating/matching other stores) though it just as easily could be rates, inventory or any searchable piece of data.  This was needed daily, and within a reasonable time frame.  It was a mindless task and one that had gone through several employees due to error, missed time,  and/or displeasure.  Through the use of RPA, this same task was done automatically- searched, compiled, and emailed to the proper team members every morning at the same time.  Management was thrilled to eliminate error and variety of delivery, employees were happy to spend their time on more engaging and gratifying work.

One Bot at a Time

For companies looking to take advantage of the benefits of RPA, but who may be lacking the budget or support, RPAaaS offers a unique entry point.  For smaller companies, it may provide the needed solution that had been previously out of reach, for larger companies, a much needed taste test/test run.  Embrace the change. Embrace the fear.  Embrace the steps.

Why Roth Automation for RPAaaS

Roth Automation’s expert consultants and engineers have years of experience designing, deploying, and optimizing business automation processes.  The RPAaaS model allows for our team to share the knowledge gained from decades of working in the enterprise space to smaller businesses looking to take advantage of the platform.

To learn how your organization can benefit from RPAaaS, speak with our expert consultants today.

The Increased Role of Technology in Banking

Risk and compliance are two areas of the utmost importance to the banking industry.  Meeting the regulatory needs relating to these functions can be a daunting undertaking.  Technology has become a valuable partner to the industry, providing opportunities to automate some of the more repetitive and laborious tasks, boosting efficiency and drastically reducing human error.  Banks are under constant attack and having the right systems in place can be a true competitive advantage.

The Challenge of Risk and Compliance

Banks today have become electronic fortresses under relentless siege by money launderers and cyber thieves. Besides the losses they incur from theft, banks must invest significant funds and resources to comply with government regulations to have processes in place to limit and detect crime through Know Your Customer, Anti -Money Laundering, and Customer Due Diligence (KYC/AML/CDD) operations.

Failure to adhere to anti-money laundering protocols can be costly. Surveys show banks are being fined at record levels for not complying with customer due diligence requirements, with a total of $15.13 billion in fines being levied in 2020, and with U.S. banks accounting for 73 percent of those violations.

The outlook is even worse as cyber criminals become ever more sophisticated and banks face rising levels of losses and risk. The amount of money being laundered through the financial services industry is estimated at $6 trillion annually, or between 2 and 5 percent of the global domestic product (GDP). However, studies show that the banking industry’s effectiveness rate in detecting suspicious activities is less than 5 percent, while the total cost for maintaining AML compliance is more than $180 billion annually.

A Herculean Task

Performing due diligence, monitoring the movement of funds, and identifying suspicious activity is difficult and expensive. Compliance regulations require banks to perform background checks that involve collecting and analyzing a massive amount of customer and business information, including the customer’s name, photo identification, address, phone number, email address, occupation, tax identification number, business model, source of funds, beneficial ownership, and more.

Background checks also involve screening against politically exposed person (PEP), session initiation protocol (SIP), Real Capital Analytics (RCA), and global sanction records and lists. Once a customer’s identity, location, and type of business is established, banks typically create customer risk profiles and risk assessments and assign different risk levels and scores to indicate the level of money laundering risk they pose.  High-risk customers will require need more in-depth due diligence and more ongoing monitoring than low-risk customers.

Only Getting Worse

Fraudsters and money launderers, meanwhile, are developing ever more complex methods of defrauding banks. This includes taking advantage of synthetic identities, data breaches, the dark web, and faster funds movement. So skilled have cyber criminals become at their art that only 1 percent of their illicit activities result in financial assets being frozen or seized.

The task of detecting and preventing bank fraud has become even more difficult during the COVID pandemic as governments disperse pandemic-relief financial aid with often marginal oversight and as stay-at-home consumers manage their finances and order more of their goods and services online.

Weak Defenses

Many banks have systems in place that are ill-equipped to perform all of the necessary background and risk scoring actions while keeping pace with the identity masking and laundering cloaking tactics of the cyber criminals in real time. The inadequacy of their detection capability is reflected in the fact that 95 percent or more of the events flagged by banks turn out to be false positives.

Besides relying on manual processes, many banks have outmoded IT infrastructures and lack of intelligent automation systems that make their background checking and real-time detection capabilities too slow and inadequate to catch the cyber criminals.

The Answer Is Intelligent Automation

The good news is that advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), intelligent process orchestration, and cloud infrastructures give banks a more effective arsenal to combat cyber crime.

Intelligent automation systems raise the bar by eliminating the repetitive, slow, complex, and error-prone tasks that are often performed manually. AI-driven automation can gather information, perform analyses, and identify suspicious patterns more rapidly to enable banks to catch financial crimes as they occur rather than too late.

Intelligent automation systems can run unattended to generate alarms and take action, and can generate visualizations that can help investigators monitor and detect crimes more quickly and effectively. Automation can improve the scoring methods used by investigators to identify fraud, which can reduce the amount of false positive cases and raise the success rate. Automating manual tasks not only improves efficiency, but can free investigators to focus on higher-level fraud detection activities.

Better Infrastructure, Better Results

Because fraud detection is based on gathering and analyzing data, the key to getting the best results is to deploy the most effective and flexible infrastructure for aggregating, integrating, and manipulating data. Many banks fall woefully short in these areas because of outdated IT environments and fragmented data repositories that cannot be easily connected or integrated.

Banks can significantly boost their fraud detection capabilities by modernizing their infrastructures. This includes unifying their data and implementing container-based cloud architectures and agile development environments coupled with intelligent automation and advanced analytics. Flexible architectures that employ continuous development and integration models enable banks to adapt quickly to new technologies, methodologies, and threats as they arise.

 Why Roth Automation for KYC/AML/CDD Automation?

Roth Automation’s expert consultants and engineers have years of experience designing, deploying, and optimizing business automation processes for national and global banking institutions.  Our expertise can assist you modernizing and optimizing your infrastructure and applying intelligent automation to more effectively perform KYC/AML/CDD operations.

To learn how your organization can benefit from intelligent automation applied to KYC/AML/CDD operations, speak with our expert consultants today.

Remodeling Traditional OCR

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has unleashed a wave of innovation that is rippling across every industry. Among the most dramatic advances is the infusion of AI and deep learning into optical character recognition (OCR), which offers businesses significant new benefits via new modes of intelligent document management.

As Information Age notes, “AI OCR tools are sleeping giants in the wider topic of digital transformation.”

OCR has been an important element of document image processing systems since the early 1990s.  The business value of OCR is derived from its ability to convert paper documents or images into searchable and readable documents, such as Word and PDF files, that can be stored in computer systems and accessed companywide.

Once converted into readable and searchable digital documents, electronic files can be stored in computer systems rather than folders, file cabinets, and warehouses. The digitized documents also can be easily modified rather than having to be retyped, which can add great value through flexible document management. All these factors have enabled businesses to increase efficiency and reduce cost using OCR-based imaging and document management systems.

OCR Stumbling Blocks

However, there are a number of impediments that have limited the capability of OCR and added labor and cost, including difficulty in deciphering handwriting, in recognizing certain typefaces and characters, and in discerning poor resolution images, seals, stamps, tables, and other document elements that frustrate traditional OCR systems.

Among the most significant OCR weaknesses is its dependence on document templates. Invoices, for example, can present an endless variety of layouts. A template must be created for each individual invoice for OCR to be able to know where to locate and read specific types of information within the fields of the document.

For each unique form or invoice, templates must be designed and the OCR system must be trained to recognize the fields within the documents. In instances in which OCR cannot recognize data, workers must review the documents and correct the information manually. These drawbacks reduce the efficiency of OCR and add cost.

AI Revolution Changes the Game

The AI revolution has been a game changer, infusing intelligence into systems across all industries. Besides advances in data science, the key factors that have contributed to the AI revolution include more powerful CPUs, massive amounts of inexpensive storage in the cloud, and in-memory computing.

The application of AI, machine learning, and deep learning to OCR is called intelligent data processing (IDP) and intelligent data capture (IDC), among other names. Machine Learning and Deep Learning are subsets of AI that are capable of self-learning, which can continually improve OCR’s recognition and analytical capabilities.

Advanced AI Transforms OCR

IDP improves OCR’s recognition capabilities by applying the most advanced AI technologies, including advanced algorithms, feature and pattern recognition techniques, natural language processing, neural networks, and machine vision.

A major advantage of IDP over traditional OCR systems is the elimination of the need for document templates. Through the ability to identify any field and data type in any document layout, IDP systems can locate and identify company names, dates, dollar amounts, order details, etc., regardless of where they appear in a document.

IDP systems can extract and analyze data from more complex documents than can traditional OCR systems. Besides improving the process of converting printed documents into readable and searchable digital formats, IDP can improve the indexing and categorizing of documents, and can add even greater value through the ability to understand the context of data within documents.

IDP can reduce the time, labor, and cost of document management, and can increase revenues and profits by applying business intelligence to the data extracted from documents and shared with other systems.

IDP Business Benefits

IDP offers benefits to organizations of all sizes and across all industries. IDP can improve the processing of forms, invoices, receipts, and other documents common to every business and agency, as well as industry-specific documents. These include core business processes such as document storage and retrieval, mailroom automation, HR automation, and data entry.

In applying IDP and business intelligence to mailroom automation, for example, incoming documents can be automatically analyzed, sorted, and routed to the appropriate business units. Data relevant to decision making can be extracted and incorporated in business analytics systems. Workflows can be created in which routed data is merged and analyzed.

Applying IDP to documents as they are converted also can improve security, fraud detection, compliance, and disaster recovery.

IDP Boost

Document-intensive fields like banking, finance, insurance, government, and healthcare have been reaping the efficiency boosting and cost-saving benefits of OCR systems for years. With the rise of IDP, these industries are able to reap a new round of productivity and analytical benefits.

Banks, for example, are using IDP to process a wide range of forms and documents, from personal and corporate account documents to mortgage documents and credit application applications. Personal and corporate mortgage applications alone can consist of a host of document types, including tax returns, salary slips, desired purchase documentation, bank statements, photo ID, inheritance verification, income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements.

These documents contain data that must be digitized, searched, extracted, and verified. Manual processing can require weeks of labor and can introduce errors. Moreover, documents must be shared among different workers who need to access different information, sometimes simultaneously.

IDP enables the entire mortgage application process to be seamlessly automated. The IDP system can extract and verify data from all the supporting documents and update the core systems and databases. The IDP system can initiate any further processing that might be required and can flag exceptions that require human workers to resolve.

Similar IDP advantages can be seen in the insurance industry, where data from thousands of claims can be extracted, merged, and analyzed for trends and patterns that can provide valuable business insights.

In the healthcare field, IDP systems are improving the processing of medical reports, laboratory tests, invoices, insurance agreements, and other documents. Once the data is extracted, it can be routed and shared with other parties and systems. Patient symptoms and laboratory test results, for example, can be extracted and fed into specialized AI systems to aid in patient diagnoses.

Similar IDP advantages can be seen in industries across the board, including energy, travel, hospitality, transportation, manufacturing, government, and retail.

A Bright AI Future

The power of AI is increasing exponentially as IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and many other major players pour money and resources into AI research and development.

By deploying AI-based OCR today, your organization will be positioned to reap an increasing wealth of benefits for years to come.

Why Roth Automation for IDP and AI-Based OCR?

Roth Automation’s expert consultants and engineers have years of experience designing, deploying, and optimizing business automation processes. Roth Automation is partnering with best-of-breed providers to create state-of-the-art AI-based OCR solutions. Our combined expertise can assist you in accruing the maximum efficiency and cost-reduction benefits that can be gained by deploying AI-based OCR.