Adding Form Processing Into Your Financial Application
As a developer working with lenders, you strive to build an application that makes life easier for your clients. In the financial industry, processing data is essential. In order to process it efficiently, lenders must collect data from a variety of different forms. Whether consumers are coming to them for a loan, bank account, or credit card, lenders must gather a variety of personal information from them in order to approve or decline the request. Fintech form processing is a key capability for financial applications.
In an ever-changing digital landscape, financial institutions big and small are struggling to keep up with the instantaneous product offerings which consumers are coming to expect. This mindset is pushing lenders to reconsider their data gathering processes, searching for faster, more efficient solutions.
Challenges Facing Financial Forms Workflows
There are so many forms consumers must fill out to get approved for financial requests. Loan applications, in particular, can be daunting. Underwriters need everything from pay stubs and bank statements to documented work history and credit score reports. It’s a lot of information for lenders to sort through, especially considering that it comes in a variety of formats.
To make things even more complicated, not all of those documents arrive at the same time or from one source. A single loan application may have different forms trickling in over the course of several weeks. Whether the lender is processing that information as it comes in or storing files for review at a later date, it can be difficult to keep everything sorted properly.
But even after receiving the proper materials, the data scattered across several form fields in multiple documents needs to make its way from the page and into the lender’s databases and applications. Traditionally, that required painstaking manual data entry processes that were both slow and prone to error. While some firms have transitioned to purely digital portals that automatically transfer entered information to the proper destination, many still rely on form documents that are either filled out by hand or submitted in digital format.
For all the talk of organizations going paperless, many lenders still need to process a large number of paper forms, which will involve a combination of manual data entry and scanning documents into digital form. Even if they are set up to receive forms online, they may not have the right software tools in place to extract data from them efficiently or route them to the proper workflow destination. Here again, lenders can end up relying on manual data entry to fill in the gaps, which increases the likelihood that human error will contribute to delays and costly mistakes.
Building a Better Forms Processing Solution
FinTech developers can help lenders manage their form processing needs by designing automated workflows that can identify forms, capture data, and route files more efficiently. The process begins with good form identification capabilities that can match a broad range of documents to existing templates. Not only is this helpful when identifying documents received digitally, but it’s also extremely useful for managing physical documents once they’ve been scanned into the application. Rather than laboriously sorting through scanned files, an automated forms identification system can quickly match batches of documents to determine what kind of form information they contain and then pass them along to the next step of the workflow.
After the identification process, forms can then be aligned with the template to improve data capture accuracy. They could also be routed to the proper storage destination at that point if information doesn’t need to be extracted right away. When the time comes to capture form field content, optical character recognition (OCR) can be applied to documents to efficiently extract text and send it to various databases or other application tools. In the case of handprinted text, intelligent character recognition (ICR) can be used to accurately identify and capture data for processing. For forms with fillable information like bubbles or checkboxes, optical mark recognition (OMR) tools can quickly read which areas have been filled in without anyone having to manually review the document.
Of course, the entire identification and data capture process will go much smoother if the application managing forms is equipped with image cleanup tools that allow it to enhance document images and remove imperfections that might interfere with form processing. This not only includes deskewing and noise removal, but also form dropout capabilities which remove any template images that obscure or overlap with information that needs to be extracted.
Creating a Solution within Your Application
Your FinTech application already offers a variety of robust services for financial professionals, but integrating forms processing capabilities can make it even more attractive in a competitive market. Accusoft’s FormSuite Collection provides a comprehensive set of SDKs for processing standardized forms as part of an automated workflow. It’s the best way to integrate forms identification and data capture into your application without compromising your development timeline or sacrificing functionality.
In addition to an extensive array of image cleanup tools, the FormSuite Collection provides the FormFix component to allow applications to quickly match document images to whatever form templates an organization uses as part of its business processes. Documents can then be efficiently routed to wherever they need to be stored for easy retrieval in the future. FormFix can also perform image dropout and features OMR capabilities for accurate data capture.
The SmartZone component is also included in the FormSuite Collection, delivering powerful OCR and ICR features that can be customized for full page or zonal data capture. With support for multiple Western and Eastern languages, SmartZone has the flexibility to handle almost any documents that pass through FinTech workflows.
By integrating the FormSuite Collection into your application, you gain much more functionality for your product and your customers gain another benefit from your services. They’ll be saving time using your application – just like you’ll save time writing code. When your clients have the ability to process data faster, they win more business. Help your customers succeed, and remain their trusted partner for digital financial technology.
For more information on the FormSuite Collection, check out our comprehensive fact sheet. If you’re ready to see how FormSuite will look within your application environment, download a free trial today.