Why financial services still rely on Document Processing - and why it’s a bottleneck
Despite digital advances, financial firms still depend heavily on reviewing documents for a few key reasons:
- Internal Policies and Processes: Long-standing internal procedures are often difficult to change and span multiple departments, from compliance to risk. As a result, document checks remain a central part of customer onboarding and verification.
- Regulatory Requirements: Institutions must review customer documents such as bank statements and payslips to meet strict obligations like KYC, AML, and Consumer Duty. These checks are essential to prove income, identity, and assess risk.
- Complexity of Document Formats: Customers provide a wide range of documents in different formats, which are challenging to standardise and process automatically without advanced, flexible technology.
- Retention Obligations: UK regulations require firms to retain customer due diligence records - including identification documents - for at least five years after a customer relationship ends. The FCA also expects records to be accurate, tamper-proof, and easily reproducible to demonstrate compliance. This makes document storage and management a critical part of operations, not just initial verification.
Together, these factors create significant bottlenecks. Manual reviews slow down decision-making, drive up operational costs, and ultimately leave customers with a subpar experience.
Why Sikoia?
Sikoia isn’t just about artificial intelligence, it’s about combining different technologies as well as applying business logic in a way that works best for verifying and automating the processing of financial documents. Our experience stems from processing a large set on a large dataset of specific customers documents. This means we understand UK documents inside out and deliver highly accurate results.
We use several layers of checks:
- Extraction: Captures data from various documents using tools like OCR and spatial analysis to pick out information precisely.
- Interpretation: Makes sense of the extracted data using machine learning and curated data dictionaries to understand what each piece means.
- Verification: Cross-checks data using business rules and other methods to confirm it’s correct.
- Consistency Checks: Applies statistical and logical rules to spot anything unusual.
Because we don’t rely on just one method, Sikoia can handle complex and varied documents accurately and reliably. Financial paperwork, from bank statements and payslips to tax returns, comes in countless formats, often with layout differences, hidden fields, annotations, or unusual data placements.
By applying a blend of techniques at every processing stage, Sikoia ensures no critical detail is missed and that extracted data is trusted.
Key Benefits for Financial Services
- Automated Document Validation
Quickly verify if customer documents are complete and genuine, cutting down fraud and manual workload.
- Faster Onboarding with Real-Time Feedback
Tell customers immediately if anything is missing or incorrect, so they can fix it straight away, slashing onboarding times from hours to minutes.
- Accurate Income and Affordability Checks
Pull income details from multiple sources, ensuring compliance and helping lenders make well-informed decisions.
- Efficiency and Cost Savings
Automate up to 75% of manual document checks, boosting accuracy over 98% and allowing staff to focus on higher-value tasks.
- Easy Integration and Flexibility
Connect Sikoia with your existing systems via API or dashboard - perfect for mortgages, lending, digital banks, or fintech businesses in the UK.