The pace of change in financial services, shaped by rising regulatory requirements and customer expectations, is transforming the way documents are processed and verified. At Sikoia, we help banks, lenders, fintechs, and brokers automate and speed up customer verification, cutting down manual work while ensuring strong compliance.

Financial services thrive on trust, speed, and accuracy - all of which rely on handling data and documents correctly. Sikoia delivers a purpose-built solution for the UK market, giving banks, lenders, and fintechs a data processing infrastructure that is both powerful and reliable, thanks to its multi-layered validation process.

Document verification is a cornerstone of trust and compliance in majority of financial processes, but it’s also one of the most complex and challenging tasks institutions face. Payslips, bank statements, tax returns, credit reports, and more arrive in countless formats, often contain hidden or inaccessible data, and can be manipulated in subtle, sophisticated ways. This complexity makes manual review slow, error-prone, and increasingly inadequate.

By integrating Sikoia, Finclusion allows customers to submit information the way they want, while leveraging both AI-powered document intelligence and Open Banking data to instantly validate income and affordability - delivering fast and accurate lending decisions.

Sikoia has partnered with Experian to enhance automated income, employment, and document verification processes. By integrating Sikoia’s intelligent document processing technology, Experian can now automate the extraction and validation of key customer information directly from submitted documents - helping lenders streamline onboarding, reduce manual work, and speed up decision-making.

In this interview, we sit down with Hugh, a transformation leader who has driven large-scale change at some of the UK’s biggest insurers. He shares candid insights on customer journey design, tackling complexity, the real value of technology, and where financial services are still ripe for reinvention. A must-read for anyone looking to understand how to balance innovation with operational reality.