Technical FAQs

The financial industry has made significant investments in document lifecycle management solutions to enhance their productivity, accuracy, and flexibility. There is broad recognition that paper-based processes are a huge source of waste and inefficiency, but simply transitioning away from paper often isn’t enough on its own to achieve true digital transformation. That’s because performing a digital-based process manually still presents many of the same problems. In order to leverage the true benefits of digital document management, FinTechs need to implement data capture and document generation capabilities as part of a broader process automation solution.

A Quick History of Data Capture & Document Generation

To understand how FinTechs can use data capture and document generation technology to enable their digital transformation, it’s helpful to take a moment to understand the history of these tools and how they’ve developed since their origins.

Data Capture

The financial industry was an early innovator in data capture technology with the development of the specialized OCR-A font in the 1960s. This simple monospace font is still used today for the account and routing numbers on an ordinary bank check. Early data capture technology relied on pattern recognition, so an exact pixel match was needed to read the characters electronically and match them to a corresponding character in a font library. While this worked well enough for scanning printed bank checks into a computer system to track transactions, reading anything else on the check with an automated system required further developments in data capture tools.

Modern character recognition technology utilizes a more sophisticated feature detection approach that uses the component elements of each character to distinguish them from one another. An “A,” for example, usually consists of the same basic elements (two angular lines that come to a point with a horizontal line crossing them) regardless of the font used. Breaking characters down into their component elements has even made it possible for software to read handwritten characters as well as machine-printed text.

Document Generation

Document generation technology emerged in the 1970s in the form of document assembly, which was originally used by lawyers to streamline contract creation. Contracts are highly structured and rules-oriented, which made it easy to build a decision-tree logic that could be understood by the software tools of that era. Early document assembly programs used a collection of document templates that incorporated conditional fields the software could replace automatically each time it generated a contract.

Modern document assembly is typically used as part of a more robust document automation solution. Software extracts information from a database and inserts it into a template to generate unique documents quickly, easily, and accurately. These programs are much more sophisticated and flexible than early document assembly tools, allowing organizations to programmatically generate a wide range of documents without ever having to look at the contents prior to the final review process.

Data Capture & Document Assembly in FinTech Today

Despite being an early innovator in OCR technology, the financial industry has been slow to implement more robust data capture capabilities throughout their operations. According to a recent study, 63% of banks are still collecting information from documents manually, a process that’s not only time consuming, but also incredibly prone to error. They’ve been slightly faster to adopt document generation, with 49% of banks still relying on manual processes to create documents. 

Ironically, FinTech organizations are even more dependent upon manual practices than traditional banks. When it comes to data capture, 75% of FinTechs are reviewing documents and entering their data manually rather than using an automated solution. The story is largely the same for document generation, as 79% of them are still creating documents manually.

Understandably, most of these organizations are planning to implement some form of automated data capture and document generation solution within the next two to three years. That’s because they recognize that it will be difficult to achieve true digital transformation without them.

Why Data Capture and Document Generation Are So Important for FinTech

FinTech companies have developed a wide range of innovative financial tools that allow consumers to take better control of their finances and help organizations manage their resources more efficiently. In order to deliver those streamlined solutions, however, FinTechs need to have the capabilities in place to make their own processes more efficient.

Data capture and document generation work together to help these organizations maximize the value and potential of their document management systems. Financial information can be submitted in many different formats, ranging from digital forms and fillable PDFs to images, flattened PDFs, and scanned documents. Extracting information from each of these formats requires a sophisticated understanding of data capture that few software developers possess. 

Once that data is extracted, it can be routed anywhere it’s needed by workflow automation tools. That could be a new document that’s being generated, but more often it will be sent to a database. When the time comes to generate a new document, previously captured information can be inserted wherever it’s needed programmatically. Multiple documents (or just sections of them) can also be merged or split apart to create entirely new ones filled with information drawn from several sources.

All of this can be done in a matter of seconds with the right software integrations, which saves a tremendous amount of time for FinTech teams who have many other priorities to focus on. By incorporating robust data capture and document generation capabilities into their platforms, they can provide faster, better functionality to their customers. Rather than uploading a document and waiting for it to be processed, information can be extracted and routed wherever it’s needed instantly to facilitate faster reviews and resolutions.

Another key benefit of data capture and document generation is accuracy. Between manually reviewing information, entering it by hand into a system, and then retrieving it to create new documents, there are plenty of opportunities for mistakes to be made. In a financial context, those errors often have the potential to be systemic, creating additional errors that are time consuming and expensive to remediate. Automated extraction and assembly remove the risk of human error, which enables FinTechs to accelerate and scale their processes more effectively.

Integrating Data Capture and Document Generation with Accusoft

For over 30 years, Accusoft has been a pioneer in building software integrations that expand application functionality. We provide a variety of data capture and document generation solutions that meet the needs of today’s FinTech platforms. Whether you’re incorporating functionality directly into your application with an SDK or deploying a cloud-based solution that connects to one of our APIs, we have the flexibility to help you integrate the features you need to complete your digital transformation.

To learn more about how Accusoft can enhance your FinTech application with data capture and document generation, talk to one of our solutions experts today.

The lifeblood of transportation companies is the ability for clients to check their shipping order status. For Manitoulin, they enhanced their web portal for customers to retrieve and view scanned documents including, bills of lading, proofs of delivery, and invoices. Shortly after its launch, the portal was accommodating over 35,000 visits per month, and challenges with viewing speed arose. Learn how Manitoulin solved this problem with Accusoft’s PrizmDoc^® for Java, formerly VirtualViewer^®.

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Data privacy continues to be a significant concern for businesses, employees, customers, and stakeholders alike. Privacy breaches can expose problems with document management and digital document security practices. They can also pose significant risks and costs to companies and stakeholders.  The importance of ensuring the secure sharing of confidential documents can’t be stressed enough.

When developing an application with SDKs or APIs or integrating new features into a workflow, developers must be aware of the security risks. Project managers, security engineers, and architects must work in tandem to identify and address all potential security breaches. This holds especially true for commercially-confidential, highly-sensitive, or private documents while in transit.

The Risks of Document Sharing

Document sharing, in general, can present opportunities for malicious actors to attempt to gain access to a competitor’s documents. It could also pave the way for uploading data containing malware accidentally. Protecting the enterprise as a whole should be a priority to prevent loss or compromise of customer-sensitive information. This is vital because even minor damage to a company’s reputation can have a devastating impact. 

When building applications with document sharing capabilities, developers need to think about the inherent risks that come along with allowing users access to upload and edit documents. Fortunately, there are a number of practical steps that developers can take to share sensitive documents securely without putting confidential information or mission-critical data at risk. 

5 Ways to Ensure Confidential Documents Are Shared Securely

1. Strengthen Application Security

Any conversation about document security needs to start with a focus on the application’s cybersecurity architecture. If document management software contains multiple vulnerabilities or doesn’t provide the necessary controls to safeguard data, it will be difficult to share sensitive documents securely. Here are a few best practices developers should have in place to create a secure application ecosystem: 

• Perform threat-modeling any time there is a major design change in the application or ecosystem to identify potential new threats.
• Encrypt customer sensitive documents both in transit and in storage. Ideally, the keys will be held by clients with an emergency access vault backup system, so that even the software developer cannot access any sensitive customer data. This way, even if an application or data centers are breached, customer documents will still be protected.
• Spend more time testing releases for weaknesses and allow security engineers and architects to weigh in on the product feature roadmap. Security patches and improvements should be given the same value as other new product features.
• Conduct periodic audits or external penetration testing to ensure that applications and customer data cannot be compromised.

2. Design Applications with Segregated Access

Secure documents and sensitive information should only be available to the people authorized to view or edit it. Access to one document should not allow someone to access other documents stored in the same application. By segregating access to data and assigning specific user permissions, developers can provide the tools customers need to manage their assets and share sensitive documents securely.

3. Eliminate External Viewing Dependencies

Although many organizations use secure applications to manage their document workflows, they frequently open themselves up to risk by relying on external software for document viewing. Without some way of sharing and viewing documents within the application itself, files will inevitably be shared over email and opened on local devices that may not have the latest security updates in place. Developers can avoid this problem by integrating HTML5 viewing capabilities into their application. This ensures that documents never have to leave a secure environment, even when they’re being shared with people outside an organization.

4. Create Unique Viewing Sessions

One of the challenges with many cloud-based document management systems is that once someone is granted access to a file, they typically retain that access until it is manually changed at a later date. In most instances, those privileges are also associated with the source file itself. This can create a number of security gaps if an organization doesn’t closely monitor access privileges. By implementing an HTML5 viewer that can generate unique viewing sessions for individual users, developers can provide more control over how to share confidential documents. Viewing sessions can be set to expire after use, and since the session is viewing a rendered version of the document instead of the source document itself, system administrators have more control over what aspects of it are shared. They may decide, for instance, to share only certain pages rather than the entire document.

5. Implement Redaction Capabilities

Redaction has long been used to protect private or confidential information in documents. Although organizations still frequently make embarrassing mistakes when it comes to redaction, it remains one of the most effective tools for anyone who needs to share sensitive documents securely. By integrating true redaction capabilities that not only obscure, but also completely remove sensitive information, developers provide applications that have the ability to screen documents for privacy risks before they’re shared with anyone. Performing redactions within the application environment also has the benefit of further limiting external dependencies that could threaten security.

Protect Confidential Documents with Accusoft Integrations

Accusoft’s collection of processing integrations give developers with a variety of document management tools for controlling privacy within their applications. The HTML5 capabilities of PrizmDoc Viewer offer powerful redaction tools and make it easier for administrators to control viewing access. 

To learn more about how Accusoft SDKs and APIs can provide the document management features you need to protect confidential information and privacy, visit our products page today or talk to one of our integration specialists.