Suruga Bank introduced invoiceAgent AI OCR to digitize handwritten data for continuous customer management.

WingArc1st Inc. is pleased to announce that Suruga Bank Ltd. has introduced invoiceAgent AI OCR that digitizes documents with highly accurate character recognition. As part of the continuous customer management mandated by the Financial Services Agency for financial institutions, SURUGA bank chose invoiceAgent AI OCR to streamline digitization tasks of the customer information confirmation forms, which contributed to a reduction of approximately 5,000 hours of annual workload.

Background:
Since 2021, Suruga Bank has been committed to continuous customer management to deter money laundering and terrorist financing, which financial institutions are required to deal with, and conducts periodic inspections to ensure that there are no unexpected changes in customer demographic information and account usage. There were approximately 20,000 customers whose information needed to be inspected per month and the number of handwritten responses was expected to reach 1,000 per month on average. The business center in the Business management division, which handles a wide variety of tasks, has limited human resources and it was big challenge to streamline digitization process. Suruga bank introduced invoiceAgent AI OCR and started full-scale operation in December 2021. The key capabilities underpinning Suruga Bank's decision were:

・Four OCR engines which enable highly accurate recognition and digitization of handwritten information in a variety of formats.
・Workflow functionality to review and approve results of digitized data

Effect of the implementation:
Introducing invoiceAgent AI OCR, Suruga Bank digitizes handwritten information in the customer information confirmation form, which has more than 200 various types of items and the data is managed in the CRM system. Digitization of the entire customer management operations has significantly reduced the workload. Specifically, if 1,000 customer information confirmation forms containing handwritten responses are processed per month, the workload is reduced by 420 hours per month and 5,000 hours per year compared to manual processing. It also cut human resources for the data conversion by 1/2.

■ Use case
https://www.wingarc.com/product/usecase/569.html (Japanese)

Suruga Bank Ltd.
Suguga Bank is a regional bank operating with 118 branches in Japan, mainly in Shizuoka and Kanagawa Prefectures. It aims to be a truly useful presence in the lives of our customers and to contribute to the realization of a prosperous and fruitful future for its communities based on the Re:Start 2025 mid-term business plan, launched in November 2019, with a vision of "Creating a New Suruga Bank".

https://www.surugabank.co.jp (Japanese)
https://www.surugabank.co.jp/surugabank/common/english

■ invoiceAgent AI OCR
invoiceAgent AI OCR is the data conversion solution for business form which reads and converts handwritten or printed text. Unique processing functions improve the accuracy of system input and reduce the cost of visual checks, thereby increasing the productivity of the person in charge of operations.

https://www.wingarc.com/product/ia/aiocr/ (Japanese)