Intelligent document processing just got more intelligent: Why financial services firms are pairing IDP with automation

Traditional document processing—even with an intelligent document processing (IDP) solution in place—isn’t cutting it anymore.

Your client-facing teams are under water. Bank statements, loan applications, insurance claims, legal documents—the sheer volume of structured and semi-structured documents that financial services firms process daily is staggering. Add countless client communications to the mix—emails, chat transcripts, social media posts, and surveys—and unfortunately, it's clear that your client-facing teams are over capacity, and as a result, underdelivering.

To handle this load, many financial services organizations have turned to IDP solutions. These solutions leverage artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and computer vision technologies to read documents and extract relevant information automatically. Without a doubt, firms that have implemented IDP solutions are reaping significant benefits: error rates are down, service level agreements (SLAs) are met faster, and client satisfaction has increased due to improved accuracy and efficiency.

“So what,” many financial services pros reading this might think. "We already have IDP solutions in place.” But the reality is that while firms may have IDP point solutions in their tech stack, they typically cover only a fraction of the workload. This limited scope often comes as a surprise to executives, until they dig deeper into the underlying causes and count the missing puzzle pieces.

Why a traditional approach to IDP falls short

Viewing IDP through this traditional lens—that is, simply as a tool for processing documents and interpreting client communications—often overlooks a critical aspect: these documents and communications are gold mines of client data, consumer preferences, and market dynamics that have massive potential to enrich business intelligence. Traditional IDP solutions usually don’t do anything with this data. And when they do, the data gets trapped in information silos or within other tools.

Another challenge: these client communications almost always feature information about what the sender wants to accomplish. However, an IDP point solution alone can’t action this information. But when IDP acts as an input mechanism within a broader AI-powered automation platform, client requests kickoff downstream actions within an impactful ecosystem of automations already running within the enterprise. The potential here to process client requests end to end is vast and ripe with opportunities.

Moreover, traditional IDP solutions can be hard to get up to speed. They’re difficult to train, and therefore, hard to scale. These systems struggle with different document types and formats, each requiring specific setups that make comprehensive coverage challenging. Training these systems involves manually marking up large datasets, a time-consuming and error-prone process. They rely on fixed templates and rules, which need manual updates for any changes. Additionally, traditional IDP systems often don’t fully leverage advanced AI resulting in limited learning and improvement capabilities, leading to lower accuracy and higher error rates.

Super-intelligent document processing: enhanced capabilities for broader impact

Though many firms are still stuck in the ways of old, we’ve evolved past many of the above limitations. Firms who've embraced the next generation of IDP are seeing better business insights (by harvesting communications for client information and preferences), native integration with complementary tools (especially with regards to downstream automations and generative AI capabilities), and faster training (and thus faster time to value).

The untapped potential of client communications

Most financial services firms view the processing of documents and answering client communications as tasks to be completed and checked off a list. This perspective misses a significant opportunity. Every email, chat transcript, and social media post contains valuable insights into client behavior and preferences. By employing IDP solutions with connectors into advanced analytics platforms, firms go beyond merely managing these communications and start synthesizing them as part of a bigger picture, gaining deeper insights for better decision making.

For example, AI-driven sentiment analysis can parse through client communications to detect patterns in customer preferences. Imagine AI models that can tag client communications with specific labels; including request type, tone, a commonly asked question, and more. Understanding these patterns at scale allows firms to proactively address issues, improve customer service strategies, and tailor their offerings to meet client needs more effectively.

Enhancing business intelligence with data-driven insights

Combining IDP with advanced analytics platforms—often featured natively within an automation platform—enables financial institutions to derive deeper insights from their data. Analytics tools can process the data extracted by IDP to identify trends, forecast future behaviors, and generate actionable business intelligence. 

For example, legal documents and contracts often contain nuanced information about client relationships and contractual obligations. An advanced IDP solution can extract and analyze this information to provide a comprehensive and personalized view into each client relationship. This enables financial services firms to understand their clients' needs, anticipate future requirements, and offer more personalized services. 

In the insurance space, data from client communications and claim histories can be analyzed to identify fraud patterns, improve risk assessment, and enhance customer segmentation strategies.

Moreover, analyzing loan applications and their accompanying documents can reveal trends in client demographics, creditworthiness, and borrowing patterns. This data can help financial services institutions develop targeted loan products, improve risk assessment models, and optimize their marketing strategies.

Streamlining compliance and risk management

The regulatory landscape in financial services is complex and ever-changing. IDP solutions can significantly streamline compliance efforts by extracting and validating data from regulatory documents and reports. 

Increased precision and limiting human errors already lead to great compliance improvements from increased accuracy alone. But now consider the improvements that come from a system that’s continuously monitoring itself and the data its ingesting.

By monitoring and analyzing documents for compliance-related information and red flags, IDP solutions can help firms identify potential compliance risks and trends before they ever become real issues.

The power of IDP within broader AI-powered automation platforms

Pairing IDP technology with a complementary technology, like automation, task mining, and process mining delivers “a more comprehensive workflow efficiency and suite of capabilities,” according to the latest IDC MarketScape Intelligent Document Processing Vendor Assessment. To fully unlock the potential of IDP, financial services firms must consider it within the context of a broader AI-powered automation platform. AI-powered automation combines automation and AI to get more value from AI across the enterprise. This ensures that the insights derived from front-end client communications are actionable and connected, end-to-end, to existing automations within the enterprise.

Intelligent document processing and AI-powered automation

Combining IDP with AI-powered automation can automate end-to-end processes, often from the first point of contact. For instance, in the banking sector, AI-powered automation can receive a batch of loan applications, and an IDP system can then extract relevant data from these applications. The AI capabilities can subsequently input this data into the appropriate systems, trigger approval workflows, and generate reports. This seamless integration reduces the need for manual intervention, minimizes errors, and speeds up processing times.

Accelerating IDP with zero-shot discovery and continuous learning

Next-generation IDP solutions offer significantly improved training and adoption times, thanks to zero-shot discovery, which eliminates the need to start from scratch. Instead of beginning with a blank slate, these advanced systems leverage pre-trained models that can quickly adapt to new document types and variations. This capability allows businesses to go into production swiftly, reducing the time and effort typically required to deploy such solutions. Once operational, these models continuously retrain with incoming data, ensuring they remain accurate and effective over time. This continuous learning cycle means that as more data is processed, the system becomes smarter and more efficient, enhancing its overall performance and reliability. By incorporating these cutting-edge features, next-gen IDP solutions not only streamline document processing workflows but also provide a scalable and sustainable approach to handling ever-evolving data landscapes.

Conclusion

The potential of IDP in financial services extends far beyond basic document management. By leveraging the full capabilities of IDP within a broader AI-powered automation platform, firms can unlock valuable insights from their documents and communications, enhance client relationships, streamline compliance, and drive operational efficiency. Viewing IDP as a strategic tool within an integrated automation ecosystem allows financial services firms to harness its true power, turning mountains of data into priceless intelligence that drives business success.

It’s for these reasons and more that analysts have chosen UiPath as a leader in their comparisons of IDP vendors.

UiPath has reinforced its position as a Leader in the Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2024, owing to continuous investments in capability expansion to process a variety of documents across industries. Additionally, its strong growth, investments in generative AI-powered Autopilot to create ML and NLP models using natural language prompts, and pre-trained models for unstructured use cases led to this inclusion."

Vaibhav Bansal, Vice President, Everest Group

Indeed, UiPath is not only the most capable vendor in terms of conventional IDP. That is data extraction. But the fact that UiPath IDP is part of a broader ecosystem of automation capabilities separates UiPath from the competition in a major way. 

Ease of use of the platform, ability to integrate its IDP capabilities with RPA and other applications, and accessibility of training and documentation are some of the key strengths highlighted by its clients.”

Vaibhav Bansal, Vice President, Everest Group

But don’t take our word for it. Check out where UiPath stacks up among IDP vendors according to the experts:

• Everest Group Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) Products PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2024

• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Unstructured Intelligent Document Processing Software 2024 Vendor Assessment

• The Forrester Wave™: Document Mining & Analytics Platforms, Q2 2024