Fellow WhoDat Bob Fresneda is President of US Operations for TCG Process.
In our second Two Question Tuesday video series, Bob answers which industry is hot-to-trot for IDP and what the most popular applications are. Regardless, many have one thing in common: improving the customer experience.
Not an NFL fan? Not sure what a WhoDat is? Bob’s got you covered a minute or so into the video.
Have a question you’d like to ask an industry expert? Would you like to be a participant? Email Bryant Duhon; [email protected]. Contact Bryant for a sample copy of DIR (The Document Imaging Report) and/or subscription details.
You can get in touch with Bob via LinkedIn or click here for the TCG Process website.
Rather read (like me) than watch/listen to a video? The transcription follows, lightly edited.
Fresneda: I have the good fortune to run the US operations for TCG Process. We’ve got a great team here based down here in New Orleans, LA. So we’re at 900 Camp St. We’ve got a beautiful office and behind me is the national World War Two museum [Editor’s Note: It is a fantastic museum.] And so everybody thinks about New Orleans as being the party, food, and music town, which we do all that very well. But there are a lot of historical reasons to visit the town.
And now you also can come down here and talk to the good people at TCG Process.
Since Bryant and I are both big WhoDat fans. If you don’t know, fans of the New Orleans Saints are the WhoDats – WhoDat Nation. Game day and the off-season you can find fans talking, “Whodat talkin’ ‘bout beat dem Saints? Whodat! Whodat!.
Duhon: That’s right, and hopefully not too many teams beat them Saints this season.
First question, which industry and why is most hot to trot for IDP solutions right now?
Fresneda: The biggest one, at least in the United States right now, is clearly insurance. There are so many different document types and unstructured content in the industry. If I’m an insurance company, I have to spread my risks. So I’ve got 10s of thousands to millions of customers around the world.
That’s a lot of documentation going back and forth. Banking would be second. If I look around from a global perspective, seeing the success that we have in Switzerland and Germany and South America, there’s still a lot of unstructured content coming in with documents and still some paper. Many of the documents come in through emails, portals, and stuff like that. But it’s unstructured content coming in for government, for healthcare, for transportation, even logistics companies are having some challenges.
We’re getting into the applications next, but a lot of the problem is that these applications couldn’t process a lot of the unstructured content. They could do the semi-structured forms and the structured forms. Now all of this “other stuff” can run through AI and machine learning (ML) to handle a lot of the problems that insurance companies and banks face around the world. So insurance I would say first and banking in the US. Around the world I would say government and healthcare along with insurance and banking.
Duhon: OK, you alluded to this a second ago, what are the most interesting applications in the in the insurance market?
Fresneda: The insurance market, it, it starts off with underwriting, claims, policy management, regulatory compliance. If I look at banking, it’s onboarding. If I look at a company like Santander Bank, they’re global customer of ours that onboards their partners and their customers, whether it’s commercial accounts, whether it’s personal accounts, whether it’s loans, mortgages or onboarding new information, whether it’s a new account or a new bank product for a commercial entity or residential customer. If you look at that information, the onboarding process has got to be faster.
Everybody’s worried about customer satisfaction and retention and everything. Onboarding is key to that. And so a lot of it is handled online and whatnot. But a lot of the documentation that supports that still comes in, whether it’s PDFs of bank statements or PDFs of proof of employment or proof of the logistics that you want to buy, whether it’s a building, whether it’s commercial or residential, your driver’s license. There’s a lot of unstructured things that come in that banks have to use to onboard somebody.
As a new customer or a new product for the bank, the bank’s always trying to get you to use another product. Bank systems don’t always talk to each other that well. So onboarding is big for that and mortgage and loan processing. But for insurance companies, like I said, it’s underwriting, claims, policy management, and regulatory compliance is big for all that documentation. With all of that interaction they have to protect themselves and they have to protect you and I as customers.
Inside of underwriting there’s a boatload of things that get processed through our system. I look at a customer like Swiss Bank that has a digital mailroom, and they classify all the different underwriting documents that come into the general mailbox and send to underwriting. The same for claims.
If I look at Onboarding, Policy Management, Policy Administration, it goes in from all the central email. It reads the data on the email, reads the attachment, gets it to the right people to start their business process.
You’ve got real people solving these problems today.
Looking a little deeper outside of the digital mailroom. Which was a buzzword years ago. But it’s real for insurance companies and banks.
Another customer of ours, Zurich Insurance Global Company, is less focused on the digital mailroom. They actually have an enterprise intelligent document processing application that takes information off of emails, takes them out of portals, reads the data from the email as well as the attachment, also has correspondence coming in and in different ways through the mail and whatnot.
They started with email processing. Then I think they started classifying the emails and then they went to capturing invoices, which is still a big application in every vertical. Then you have first notice of loss and things like that. So different companies in insurance are going to use either a digital mailroom or enterprise intelligent document processing solution in that way.
If you think about it like I said earlier, it’s the emergence of a lot of this AI and ML that’s driving this because before the form had to be set up correctly. You had to set up all these templates and all that stuff. Now you don’t have to do that.
Another driving factor for all the verticals is the emergence of robotic process automation, RPA. RPA basically drove a lot of the new growth in the IDP space because RPA had to have real data to do something. All of this unstructured content wasn’t able to start the process, so converting this unstructured content into data, RPA could then take off.
You had some legacy companies that have been around doing OCR stuff for years. Companies like Kofax and ABBYY basically have an impressive install base. You know they’re kind of like fat and happy with their solutions. And then you have the underlying companies with a bunch of venture capital that are coming after them to go after it and they don’t have quite the experience in the market. They’ve got some cool technologies. They’ve got some people out there with some money and these guys have great ideas, but they don’t have the experience in the market for insurance, banking and all these vertical.
It’s a bigger market now. You know, I talked to Ralph Gammon [Infosource Senior Software Analyst). He says the amount of groups that him and Harvey (Spencer, semi-retired capture expert; his research – and Conference; come join us Sept 6&7 this year! – was purchased by Infosource just over three years ago) used to cover was, you know, fewer than 30 or 40 vendors. Now it’s in the hundreds; three, four hundred companies.
We’re proud of where we fit. We have a new modern infrastructure done out of Switzerland that we market around the US – and it’s a very competitive space. We like to think that we bring the experience of the technology in a robust market with our knowledge about knowing how to solve it.
We’re investing in the future for it because Microsoft’s investing in this, which is great for all of our companies. We don’t compete with Microsoft. Google’s investing, Amazon’s investing and those are going to hurt the SDK market itself. They’re going to provide processing for unstructured content. So if I’m an insurance customer or I’m a bank customer or government or healthcare, I’m excited about the future of IDP because you’ve got some really good companies out there, both the legacy companies and new companies and companies like us that fit into a nice niche market that can help them solve their problems.
With the huge funding of companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft they are gonna go out and figure out how to read all these damn documents that nobody knew how to read for years. Then we’ll just handle the extraction, the validation, the processing, doing all the rules, all the validations that this is Bob’s document. Is it Bob’s document? And why are there four different pieces, there’s Bob’s there. Was Bob trying to fool the system by putting in his wife or girlfriends, brothers, W2 in there because they make more money than poor Bob does.
It’s an exciting time to be in this market.
Duhon: Thank you, Bob. And as you were speaking, I couldn’t help but think there’s no excuse for insurance companies to deliver a bad customer experience – there are plenty of solutions to help them provide a good customer onboarding experience.
It’s great to have the two questions limitation. That’s also frustrating to have the two questions limitation. But we’re going to call it an interview. Bob, thanks, as always.
