Opportunities for Bank Statement Extraction
Xtracta is a highly flexible system that supports data extraction from numerous document types, including bank statements. The digital revolution has driven an increasing demand for such services, particularly as banks and other lenders switch to more digital platforms.
As a result of this trend, we have seen a rise in demand for bank statement data extraction software across various industries, particularly finance. Today, we explore the importance of bank statement data extraction, its various use cases in different industries, and the benefits of Xtracta’s bank statement extraction capability.
Bank Statement Data Extraction and Its Use Cases
Bank statements contain valuable information businesses across various industries use to deliver products and services to their clients, particularly in the financial services industry, providing continuous insights into a person’s or organization’s financial behavior and acumen.
Automatically processing large numbers of bank statements can save costs, improve decision-making accuracy, and reduce the time-to-value for companies offering financial products and services. Here are some common use cases of bank statement data extraction in the financial industry:
1. Customer onboarding and maintenance:
Businesses require bank statement data to onboard or update customer information, particularly for performing Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures.
2. Eligibility determination for loan and mortgage applications:
Bank statement data is valuable for assessing an individual’s financial discipline and spending behavior when determining eligibility and affordability for loans, mortgages, finance, and insurance products.
3. Rentals:
Bank statements are increasingly used to verify an individual’s income and to ensure they have paid their previous rent on time. Some landlords may also review spending habits to ensure tenants are not reckless spenders.
4. Auditing:
Bank statements are used in auditing to help assess risk scores and marry up bank transactions with relevant accounting documents. Auditors need bank statements to check if a company made a significant payment and if there is correct paperwork to match against it.
Often, digital banking data won’t be accessible, and auditors need to fall back on physical or digital bank statements to perform audits. Data extraction software like Xtracta can significantly speed up this process, capturing bank statement data accurately for easy review and sorting.
5. Accounting:
Accountants must process bank statements to perform monthly and annual financial reviews, bank reconciliations, and expense reviews, among other things, before closing books for each period.
Sometimes, electronic bank data files are unavailable for accounting, or the accountant may have a large historical set of transactions to process. Using a tool like Xtracta, accountants can convert bank statement data into an electronic format, making this review process much easier.
6. Anti-money laundering controls:
Bank statement data is essential to anti-money laundering (AML) controls as it provides a detailed record of a customer’s financial transactions. AML regulations require financial institutions to monitor customer transactions and report suspicious activity to the relevant authorities. Using bank statements, financial institutions can identify potential money laundering activities by providing information about the source and destination of funds, the frequency and number of transactions, and the types of transactions conducted.
7. Fraud detection & forensic investigations:
Forensic investigators frequently use bank statements to analyse and identify potential victims and perpetrators of financial fraud. Xtracta can also function as part of the fraud detection process, helping identify patterns, potential fraud, and manipulation of financial data.
8. Bank statement diversity at scale:
Bank statements come in various formats, challenging companies in the financial services industry to process them quickly and at scale to stay ahead of their competitors. Xtracta’s software is powered by artificial intelligence and optical character recognition (AI and OCR), making it easy for businesses to efficiently extract large volumes of data from numerous document types and formats.
Client Use Case: Data Extraction to Significantly Enhance Processing Accuracy & Speed
Here, we share a specific client use case where Xtracta’s bank statement extraction capabilities significantly enhanced data processing accuracy and speed, rippling down to substantial improvements throughout the business.
The client is a South African company with extensive experience in fraud detection. Before using Xtracta, the company relied primarily on manual data capture processes, which are very time and labour-intensive. Bank statements can vary widely in format and required information due to various factors, making manual processing extremely arduous. Factors influencing the layout and design of a bank statement include:
- Regulatory requirements (which vary by country or region)
- A bank’s internal systems and processes
- The different financial account types and products it offers.
For this company, an efficient data extraction service like Xtracta was paramount for accurately, easily, and promptly capturing large volumes of bank statements before sending that data to other systems for analysis. Some of the ways Xtracta assists the company include the initial evaluation and analysis:
- Initial evaluation: Metadata can be lifted from PDF bank statements, which is evaluated for possible tampering or manipulation for anti-fraud purposes, enabling them to save time and money when ensuring compliance and checking for potential fraud.
- Further analysis: For documents that pass the initial control procedure, the bank statement data is automatically extracted and sent to other downstream applications that can, for example, determine the spending behaviour or source of funds of an individual much more efficiently.
This process can greatly increase accuracy and reduce the time necessary to evaluate and communicate to customers which products and services they are qualified to receive.
With this increased efficiency and saved time, the company can dedicate more time to improving the quality of their products and services for the end customer, resulting in greater customer satisfaction and retention with decreased financial risk.
Why Choose Xtracta Over Other Platforms?
Xtracta’s bank statement extraction service efficiently captures data from different formats while accommodating variability.
Furthermore, Xtracta’s prebuilt models can extract a significant amount of data without extensive training. Users can easily train the system to suit their specific bank and designs/formats, leading to almost perfect results. Our shared training data further reduces the required training time for clients using our public cloud.
Xtracta is easily set up and highly configurable, making integration with third-party software a breeze. So, if you want to offer a bank extraction capability within your software, for example, if you have auditing software and want users to upload bank statements, Xtracta has all the necessary APIs to support that.
Additionally, while people working with lower volumes of documents can use Xtracta, it also caters to users with more advanced requirements. Xtracta is particularly well-suited to those who want to offer extraction at higher volumes.
Discover Xtracta’s Bank Statement Data Extraction Capabilities for Your Business
Companies commonly use Xtracta to streamline their receipt, contract, and bank statement data capture processes, and it is highly configurable for easy integration with business software.
If you’d like to learn more about Xtracta’s specialised approach to document processing and discover the benefits of our bank statement extraction capability, get in touch with the team today.
