UBL: United Bank Limited Turns to Kofax to Streamline Branch Network Document Handling Processes
NCR-deployed solution endorses cheques via scanned data and delivers various value-added financial instrument services
The Challenge
The instrument clearing process is done manually in Pakistan, with one clearing house overseeing 18 offices in various cities. Riders of the clearing house collect cheques from banks at predefined cutoff times. The cheques are then physically routed the next working day to the owner branches/banks, who in turn inform the clearing house of the status of the instruments. Rejected cheques are collected by the clearing house and returned to the branch where they were presented. This whole cycle takes three to four days, so a customer visiting a branch to make an inquiry is often told to wait for a few weeks to find out the status of the physical instrument.
UBL previously had to post all cheques manually, with no central imaging or archival solution and with two to three people per branch dedicated to clearing. The bank wanted to speed up the process and at the same time cut costs where possible. It also looked to a solution that could provide value-added services such as online instrument statement availability and payments by instruments at merchant locations.
"Speed and accuracy are critical to the financial services business; unfortunately, the manual nature of cheque clearing compromises these two areas. A solution that can overcome a lot of the constraints of the manual cycle would be very beneficial for our operations and for our clients," said MR. Bahauddin Khan – Group Executive Global Operations and Technology, United Bank Limited.
The Solution
The bank decided to eliminate deposit slips by using solutions from business systems developer NCR capable of endorsing the back of cheques with information normally inputted in deposit slips. NCR in turn decided to customize Kofax Capture, a powerful, production-level information capture software, to turn deposit slip information into retrievable data for cheque endorsement.
"We wanted a system that could keep pace with the thousands of documents we process in a day, and at a high level of resolution. We also preferred something that would allow us to offer additional instrument-related services to our customers," added Mr. Bahauddin.
Kofax VRS, an application for improving scanning efficiency and quality, was also adopted to handle huge volumes of data while meeting stringent imaging standards. The imaging system integrates Kofax Capture with Kofax VRS to process letters and financial instruments such as cheques, and took only a month to fully implement into production.
The Results
A customer or UBL branch staff now fills a grid which is scanned by the NCR system and then classified and read by Kofax Capture via its advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) engines. Around 30,000 pages are scanned by the Kofax-powered system on average per day.
The new UBL clearing system has greatly reduced processing times and manual effort. It also offers value-added services such as online instrument statement availability and payments by instruments at merchant locations. Instrument images are transported to a central processing unit throughout the day, thus dramatically reducing the clearing cycle for the bank.
"Through Kofax technology and NCR hardware/software solutions, we have been able to significantly reduce processing cycles, clear visibility on the float, and cut down our operation costs. We do not even use scan operators anymore since the imaging system is fully automated. Moreover, we were able to add services such as Cash Management Transactions which were not part of the original solution scope that now provides us with more business advantages," concluded Syed Mujeeb, Head of IT BRM Division.
