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Are You Ready for a Mobile Tomorrow? Mobile Capture in Banking and Auditing
November 06, 2015
Mobile capture is a trend
The number of enterprise applications optimized for mobility will quadruple by 2016, according to IDC. Companies use mobile applications to boost their productivity more and more, and mobile spending rounds out the top 5 budget items for 2015 identified by IT executives, respondents to the Computerworld survey. We at ABBYY also see a growing interest among our customers in mobile capture technologies. During the last 2 years we have had many interesting projects in this area and would like to share with you a couple of cases that demonstrate how business process optimization can be done using Mobile Capture.
Mobile capture for banking and auditing: field manager’s job automation
In banking and auditing the field manager’s job usually includes dealing with piles of documents that should be collected from customers and transferred to a back office. Companies are interested in optimizing this process, and the number one reason for this is that faster customer service is needed. The second reason is the need to decrease the time that the field manager wastes on one customer making multiple visits, and thus decrease sale costs.
For example, in banking it normally takes several days to open a new account or make a final decision on a loan: a field manager visits a customer and collects all the required documents, 1-3 days later brings them to the back office, and managers in the back office make a decision. However, during this time the customer may change their decision, etc. Faster service is needed!
In auditing workers who deal with documents on the client side are faced with another problem: in some countries copies of the documents checked by the auditor have to be kept by the auditing company by law. Making paper copies at the customer’s office is possible, but there are too many documents, and it’s difficult for managers to carry them.
So, there are 2 ways to bring documents faster and easier:
Way 1: Scan them using the customer’s scanner and send the images to the back office. Benefits: you receive good-quality images and you get them faster.
Problems: not the easiest way because the field manager has to find a scanner, set up a connection between this scanner and the manager’s laptop, and occupy the scanner for some time which is not always conducive to making the customer happy, etc.
Or
Way 2: Take photos using the field manager’s smartphone and send them to the back office via a mobile application.
Benefits: faster service, required equipment is already in place, plus additional opportunities to track and control field manager’s activities.
Problems:
- Transferring images over mobile Internet connections requires good bandwidth, which is not always available
- Taking a good-quality image with a smartphone’s camera is not as easy as scanning, which is why bad-quality images may sometimes be received from the field manager. If further data capture is required, a bad-quality image will not do, so additional time for image retaking (and visiting the customer again) may be required. All this leads to increased costs, business-process delays, and in the end to the loss of customers.
More and more companies are opting for the second approach and we are happy to help such innovative companies solve their problems with mobile capture.
How to solve these problems?
Our customers use ABBYY Mobile Capture SDK (formerly ABBYY Mobile Imaging SDK). Integrated into a mobile application used by the field manager, this SDK allows to check image quality right on the smartphone and to request that another picture be taken if the image quality is not good enough (it is blurred, there is a glare on the image, etc.). After receiving a good-quality image its size can be reduced using the same SDK for faster transfer via a mobile Internet connection. Now the image is ready for automatic data capture in the back office! 
Case study of one of the Big Four companies
One of the Big Four companies has integrated mobile capture into the application used by its employees who visit customers and audit documents on the client’s side. The business issue: in Russia auditors have to keep copies of the documents that were reviewed to make an audit report, but it’s difficult to scan documents on the client’s side and it’s difficult to carry them.
The solution:
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Banking case study
One of the Top-10 Russian Banks has integrated mobile capture into the application used by the bank’s field managers who sell the bank’s products and collect required documents on the client’s side.
The business issue: the bank wanted to automate the process of collecting the client's documents and decrease the time required to open a new account and finish the sale.
Project goals:
- Reduced waiting time when opening an account from 2-3 days to 40 minutes
- Reducing the influence of the human factor in document verification
- Simplification of KPI calculation for a field manager.
The solution:
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As Benjamin Franklin said, “Time is money”. Businesses are looking for ways to speed up their processes, and for companies who have field managers dealing with documents, mobile capture is really a godsend. We’ll keep you posted on new interesting projects demonstrating the power of mobile technologies.