Japan's Mizuho Financial Group has teamed up with six regional financial institutions to develop an AI-based tool for automating data processing of hand-written documents and non-standard forms.
Using a mix of AI, optical character recognition (OCR) and robotic process automation (RPA) technology, the new tool, dubbed 'The AOR' is aiming to automate and streamline the manual data-entry heavy process of dealing with hand-written documents.
A proof-of-concept with six regional financial institutions and NTT Data Corporation on requests for direct debits from accounts, saw manual data-entry slashed by around 80%.
Mizuho says the project boosts cooperation with regional financial institutions and improve the productivity of FIs overall. It plans to introduce The AOR within its operations sometime this year.
The FS giant has also revealed that it has made an investment in Cogent Labs, an OCR specialist it called in to help on the tool.