“Noise in machine learning just means errors in the data, or random events that you cannot predict.”

—Pedro Domingos

“Noise” – the quantum of which has grown over the years in the loan processing, is one of the main reasons why bankers have been rooting for automation of loan processing for some time now. The other reason is data integrity, which gets compromised when low-end manual labor is employed during loan processing. In a poll conducted by Moody’s Analytics, when questioned about the challenges they faced in initiation of loan processing, 56% of the bankers surveyed answered that manual collection of data was the biggest problem.

Manual processing of loan documents involves:

• Routing documents/data to the right queue
• Categorizing/classifying the documents based on type of instruction
• Extracting information – relevant data points vary by classification and relevant business rules Feeding the extracted information into the ERP, BPM, RPA
• Checking for soundness of information
• Ensuring the highest level of security and transparency via an audit trial.

“There’s never time to do it right. There’s always time to do it over.”

With data no longer remaining consistent, aggregating, and consolidating dynamic data (from sources such as emails, web downloads, industry websites, etc.) has become a humongous task. Even when it comes to static data, the sources and formats have multiplied over the years, so manually extracting, classifying, tagging, cleaning, tagging, validating, and uploading the relevant data elements: currency, transaction type, counterparty, signatory, product type, total amount, transaction account, maturity date, the effective date, etc., is not a viable option anymore. And adding to the complexity is the lack of standardization in the Taxonomy with each lender and borrower using different terms for the same Data Element.

Hence, the need for automation, and integration of the multiple workflows used in loan origination – right from the input pipeline, the OCR pipeline, pre-and post-processing pipelines, to the output pipeline for dissemination of data downstream. With the added advantage of achieving a standard Taxonomy, at least in your shop.

The benefits of automating certain low-end, repetitive, and mundane data extraction activities

Reducing loan processing time from weeks to days: When the integrity of data is certain, when all data exchanges are consolidated and centralized in one place instead of existing in silos in back, middle, and front offices, only then can bankers reduce the loan processing time from months, weeks to days.

That was what JP Morgan Case achieved with COIN. They saved an estimated 360k hours or 15k days’ worth of manual effort with their automated contract management platform. It is not hard to imagine the kind of impact it had on the customer experience (EX)!

More time for proper risk assessment: There is less time wasted in keying and rekeying data. With machines taking over from nontechnical staff, the AI (Artificial Intelligence) pipelines are not compromised with erroneous, duplicate data stored in sub-optimal systems. With administrative processes streamlined, there’s time for high-end functions such as reconciliation of portfolio data, thorough risk assessment, etc.

Timely action is possible: Had banks relied on manual processes, it would have taken ages to validate the client, and by that time it could have been too late.

Ensuring compliance: By automating the process of data extraction from the scores of documents (that banks are inundated with during the course of loan processing) and by combining the multiple pipelines where data is extracted, transformed, cleaned, validated with a suitable business rules engines, and thereafter loaded for downstream, banks are also able to ensure robust governance and control for meeting regulatory and compliance needs.

Enhances the CX: Automation has a positive impact on CX. Bankers also save dollars in compensation, equipment, staff, and sundry production expenses.

Doing it Right!

One of Magic FinServ’s success stories comprises a solution for banking and financial services companies that successfully allows them to optimize the extraction of critical data elements (CDE) from emails and attachments with Magic’s bespoke tool – DeepSight^TM for Transaction processing and accelerator services.

The problem:

Banks in the syndicated lending business receive large volume of emails and other documented inputs for processing daily. The key data is embedded in the email message or in the attachment. The documents are in PDF, TIF, DOCX, MSG, XLS, form. Typically, the client’s team would manually go through each email or attachment containing different Loan Instructions. Thereafter the critical elements are entered into a spreadsheet and then, uploaded, and saved in the bank’s commercial loan system.

As is inherent here there are multiple pipelines for input, pre-processing, extraction, and finally output of data, which leads to duplication of effort, is time consuming, resulting in false alerts, etc.

What does Magic Solution do to optimize processing time, effort, and spend?

• Input Pipeline: Integrate directly with an email box or a secured folder location and execute processing in batches.
• OCR Pipeline: Images or Image based documents are first corrected and enhanced (OCR Pre-Processing) before feeding them to an OCR system. This is done to get the best output from an OCR system. DeepSight^TM can integrate with any commercial or publicly available OCRs.
• Data Pre-Processing Pipeline: Pre-Processing involves data massaging using several different techniques like cleaning, sentence tokenization, lemmatization etc., to feed the data as required by optimally selected AI models.
• Extraction Pipeline: DeepSight’s accelerator units accurately recognize the layout, region of interest and context to auto-classify the documents and extract the information embedded in tables, sentences, or key value pairs.
• Post-Processing Pipeline: Post-Processing pipeline applies all the reverse lookup mappings, business rules etc. to further fine tune accuracy.
• Output Storage: Any third-party or in-house downstream or data warehouse system can be integrated to enable straight through processing.
• Output: Output format can be provided according to specific needs. DeepSight^TM provides data in excel, delimited, PDF, JSON, or any other commonly used format. Data can also be made available through APIs. Any exception or notifications can be routed through emails as well.

Technologies in use

Natural language processing (NLP): for carrying out context-specific search from emails and attachments in varied formats and extracts relevant data from it.

Traditional OCR: for recognizing key characters (text) scattered anywhere in the unstructured document is made much smarter by overlaying an AI capability.

Intelligent RPA: is used to consolidate data from various other sources such as ledgers, to enrich the data extracted from the documents. And finally, all this is brought together by a Rules Engine that captures the organization’s policies and processes. With Machine Learning (ML) and a human-in-the-loop approach to carry out truth monitoring, the tool becomes more proficient and accurate every passing day.

Multi-level Hierarchy: This is critical for eliminating false positives and negatives since payment instructions could comprise of varying CDEs. The benefits that the customer gets are:

• Improve precision on Critical Data Elements (CDEs) such as Amounts, Rates and Dates etc.
• Contains false positives and negatives to reduce the manual intervention

Taxonomy: Train the AI engine on taxonomy is important because:

• Improve precision and context specific data extraction and classification mechanism
• Accuracy of the data elements which refer to multiple CDEs will improve. For e.g., Transaction Type, Dates and Amounts

Human-eye parser: For documents that contain multiple pages and lengthy preambles you require a delimitation of tabular vs. free flow text. The benefits are as follows:

• Extraction of tabular data, formulas, instructions with multiple transaction types all require this component for seamless pre and post processing

Validation & Normalization: For reducing the manual intervention for the exception queue:

• An extensive business rule engine that leverages existing data will significantly reduce manual effort and create an effective feedback loop for continuous learning

OCR Assembling: Highly required for image processing of vintage contracts and low image quality (i.e., vintage ISDAs):

• Optimize time, cost and effort with the correct OCR solution that delivers maximum accuracy.

Conclusion

Spurred on by competition from FinTech and challenger banks, that are using APIs, AI, and ML for maximizing efficiency of loan processing, the onus is on banks to maximize efficiency. The first step is ensuring data integrity with the use of intelligent tools and business-rules engines that make it easier to validate data. It is after all much easier to pursue innovation and ensure that SLAs are met when workflows are automated, cohesive, and less dependent on human intervention. So, if you wish to get started and would like more information on how we can help, write to us mail@magicfinserv.com.

Wealth managers are standing at the epicenter of a tectonic shift, as the balance of power between offerings and demand undergoes a dramatic upheaval. Regulators are pushing toward a ‘constrained offering’ norm while private clients and independent advisors demand a more proactive role. FinTech Innovation: Paolo Sironi

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning-based analytics, recommendation engines, next best action engines, etc., are powering the financial landscape today. Concepts like robo-advisory (a $135 Billion market by 2026) for end-to-end self-service investing, risk profiling, and portfolio selection, Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality or Metaverse for Banking and Financial trading (Citi plans to use holographic workstations for financial trading) are creating waves but will take time to reach critical value.

In the meanwhile, there’s no denying that Fintechs and Financial Institutions must clean their processes first – by organizing and streamlining back, middle, and front office operations with the most modern means available such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, RPA, and the cloud. Hence, the clarion call for making back, middle and front office administrative processes of financial institutions the hub for change with administrative AI.

What is administrative AI?

Administrative AI is quite simply the use Artificial Intelligence based tools to simplify and make less cumbersome administrative processes such as loans processing, expense management, KYC, Client Life Cycle Management / Onboarding, data extraction from industry websites such as SEC, Munis, contract management, etc.

Administrative AI signals a paradigm shift in approach – which is taking care of the basics and the less exciting first. It has assumed greater importance due to the following reasons:

1. Legacy systems make administrative processes chaotic and unwieldy and result in duplication of effort and rework:

Back and middle office administrative processes are cumbersome, they are repetitive, and sometimes unwieldy – but they are crucial for business. For example, if fund managers spend their working hours extracting data and cleaning excel sheets of errors, there will be little use of the expensive AI engine for predicting risks in investment portfolios or modeling alternative scenarios in real time. With AI life becomes easier.

2. Administrative AI increases productivity of work force, reduces error rate resulting in enhancec customer satisfaction

AI is best for processes that are high volume and where the incidences of error are high such as business contracts management, regulatory compliance, payments processing, onboarding, loan processing, etc. An example of how Administrative AI reduces turnaround time and costs is COIN – contract intelligence developed by J P Morgan Chase that reviews loan agreements in a record time.

3. Administrative costs are running sky-high: In 2019, as per a Forbes article, Banks spent an estimated $ 67 billion on technology. The spending on administrative processes is still umongous. From the example provided below (Source: McKinsey) 70% of the IT spend is on IT run and technical debt that is the result of unwieldy processes and silos.

4. Without reaching the critical mass of process automation, analytics, and high-quality data fabric, organizations risk ending up paralyzed

And lastly, even for the moonshot project, you’ll need to clear your core processes first. The focus on financial performance does not mean that you sacrifice research and growth. However, if processes that need cleaning and automation are not cleaned and automated, then the business could be saddled with expensive start-up partnerships, impenetrable black-box systems, cumbersome cloud computational clusters, and open-source toolkits without programmers to write code for them.” (Source Harvard Business Review )

So, if businesses do not wish to squander the opportunities, they must be practical with their approach. Administrative AI for Fintechs and FIs is the way forward.

Making a difference with Magic DeepSight^TM Solution Accelerator

Administrative AI is certainly a great way to achieve cost reduction with a little help from the cloud, machine learning, API-based AI systems. In our experience, we provide solutions for such administrative tasks that provides significant benefits in terms of productivity, time and accuracy while improving the quality of work environment for the Middle and Back-office staff. For banks, capital markets, global fund managers, promising Fintechs and others, a bespoke solution that can be adapted for every unique need like DeepSight^TM can make all the difference.

“Magic DeepSight^TM is an accelerator-driven solution for comprehensive extraction, transformation, and delivery of data from a wide range of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data sources leveraging cognitive technologies of AI/ML along with other methodologies to provide holistic last-mile solution.”

Success Stories with DeepSight^TM

Client onboarding/KYC

• Extract and process a wide set of structured/unstructured documents (e.g., tax documents, bank statements, driver’s licenses, etc.
• From diverse data sources (email, pdf, spreadsheet, web downloads, etc.)
• Posts fixed format output across several third-party and internal applications for case management such as Nice Actimize

Trade/Loan Operations

• Trade and loan operation instructions are often received as emails and attachments to emails.
• DeepSight^TM intelligently automates identifying the emails, classifying and segregating them in folders.
• The relevant instructions are then extracted from emails and documents to ingest the output into order/loan management platforms.

Expense Management

• Invoices and expense details are often received as PDFs or Spreadsheets attached to emails
• DeepSight^TM Identifies types of invoices – e.g., deal related or non-deal related or related to any business function legal, HR etc.
• Applies business rules on the extracted output to generate general ledger codes and item lines to be input in third-party applications (e.g., Coupa, SAP Concur).

Website Data Extraction

• Several processes require data from third party websites e.g., SEC Edgar, Muni Data.
• This data is typically extracted manually resulting in delays.
• DeepSight^TM can be configured to access websites, identify relevant documents, download the same and extract information.
• Several processes require data from third party websites e.g., SEC Edgar, Muni Data.
• Applies business rules on the extracted output to generate general ledger codes and item lines to be input in third-party applications (e.g., Coupa, SAP Concur).

Contracts Data Extraction

• Contract/Service/Credit agreements are complex and voluminous text-wise. Also, there are multiple changes in the form of renewals and addendums.
• Therefore, managing contracts is a complex task and requires highly skilled professionals.
• DeepSight^TM provides a configured solution that simplifies buy-side contract/service management.
• Combined with Magic FinServ’s advisory services, the buy-side firm’s analyst gets the benefits of a virtual assistant.
• Not only are the errors and omissions that are typical in human-centric processing reduced significantly, but our solution also ensures that processing becomes more streamlined as documents are categorized according to type of service, and for each service provider, only relevant content is identified and extracted.
• Identifies and segregates different documents and also files all documents for a particular service provider in the same folder to enable ease of access and retrieval.
• A powerful business rules engine is at work in the configuration, tagging, and extraction of data.
• Lastly, a single window display ensures better readability and analysis.

Learning from failures!

Before we conclude, an example of a challenger bank that set up an account within 10 minutes, and provided customers access to money management features, and a contactless debit card in record time to prove why investor preferences are changing. It was once a success story that every fintech wanted to emulate. Toda. y, it is being investigated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) over potential breaches of financial crime regulations. (Source: BBC) There were reports of freezing several accounts on account of suspicious activity. The bank has also undergone losses amounting to £115 million or $142 million in 2020/21 and its accountants about the “material uncertainty” of its future.

Had they taken care of the administrative processes, particularly those dealing with AML and KYC? We may never know? But what we do know is that it is critical to make administrative processes cleaner and automated.

Not just promising FinTechs, every business needs to clean up its administrative processes with AI:

Today’s business demands last-mile process automation, integrated processes, and a cleaner data fabric that democratizes data access and use across a broad spectrum of financial institutions such as Asset Managers, Hedge Funds, Banks, FinTechs, Challengers, etc. Magic FinServ’s team not only provides advisory services; we also get into the heart of the matter. Our hands on approach leveraging Magic FinServ’s Fintech Accelerator Program helps FinTechs and FIs modernize their platforms to meet emerging market needs.

For more information about Magic Accelerator write to us mail@magicfinserv.com Or visit our website: www.magicfinserv.com