Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is a solution that helps transform unstructured data from documents into structured data. IDP merges the power of OCR, AI, ML, and NLP to accurately process all documents and feed the output into downstream applications.

Per an Everest Group report, the global market for Intelligent Document Processing was US$700–750 million in 2020 and expected to grow 55–56%. Last year, it was nearly estimated at about $1.5 billion.

Where does IDP make a difference? Are there specific industries that can leverage it? What are the applications?

At a broad level, the industry verticals that are frontline adopters include:

⦁ Banking – processing KYC documents, underwriting loans, bank statements, and checks
⦁ Insurance – claims processing and underwriting policies
⦁ Healthcare – medical records, patient information, physician referrals, radiology reports, and claims processing
⦁ Telecom – KYC documents, proof of delivery, custom declarations, and maintenance logs
⦁ Manufacturing – invoice processing, order forms, supply chain, and quality assurance records
⦁ Legal – contract management and discovery process
⦁ Retail – order processing, receipt, and expense management
⦁ Human Resources – Resume screening and employee onboarding
⦁ Government and public sector – citizen services and regulatory compliance
⦁ Energy and utilities – meter reading and regulatory reporting

On the other hand, while everybody talks about digitalization and going paperless, the implementation lags behind and many industries are riddled with paper documentation. Given this scenario, Intelligent Document Processing can help organizations across verticals. Let’s look at some use cases where IDP can help.

IDP use cases

Invoice Processing: According to g2.com, an average-sized company, which receives over 3000–5000 invoices, roughly takes 25 days to process a single invoice manually.

Automating this can significantly reduce the processing time and save costs.

An IDP solution would ensure document capture, data extraction, data validation, matching with purchase orders and receipts, exception handling, workflow automation, approval routing, ERP integration, reporting, and analytics. This would streamline the entire accounts payable and receivable workflows.

Loan and Mortgage processing

When you talk about mortgages, you talk about a high volume of documents in both structured and unstructured formats. This makes the process very fragmented.

IDP would extract and verify applicant information, financial documents, credit reports, and collateral details for faster and more accurate loan approvals. The entire processing time can be shortened to days from weeks, besides ensuring accuracy and reliability.

KYC Process

The financial, banking, and telecom industry must perform KYC that helps them verify and identify new clients and risks involved with them. It involves a long and tedious exchange of documents—proof of identity and address are the key components. There are multiple documents that can be used – passports, driver’s licenses, and utility bills, to name a few. They come in different formats, shapes, and sizes, and people upload them with varying scan qualities. Financial institutions spend a fortune on validating the KYC of their customers, which has to be done periodically.

IDP helps in capturing and extracting data from all these documents and varying formats for it to be processed further. Besides expediting the process, it helps reduce manual errors and ensures strong controls from the standpoint of governance and compliance.

Contract Management

This is a massive use case for organizations. Many organizations miss out on automated contract renewal clauses. Before they know it, they have already gotten into a contract.

With IDP, you can automatically extract critical terms, clauses, and obligations from contracts to ensure compliance, reduce risk, and manage contractual relationships efficiently.

Health Records

Access to medical records is crucial when you want to provide service to a patient. Processing patient intake forms, diagnosis details, enrolment documents, and health insurance claims forms is repetitive and time-consuming for the account team.

IDP can help smoothly capture, extract, validate, and automate data integration with existing medical records applications. This means easy access for healthcare professionals to accurate and relevant information, without holdups, and in the shortest time.

Healthcare Claims Processing

As an insurance organization, you rely on a paper-based system and often struggle with data processing because of unstructured data and variable formats such as emails, scanned and physical documentation, pdfs, and handwritten prescriptions. Manual processing leads to complex workflows, delayed processing time, high costs, increased errors, and fraud, making it a lengthy process for insurers and customers.

IDP can automate extracting patient information, treatment details, code validation, pre-authorization checks, and automated review of healthcare claim forms to accelerate claim adjudication.

Legal Document Analysis

Legal documents are notorious for their complex verbiage, difficulties in interpretation, as well as the severity of consequences of errors.

Here again, IDP can assist in legal research and discovery by automatically categorizing, extracting, and summarizing information from legal documents, contracts, case files, and court records. It can identify and validate legal citations, references to statutes, regulations, and case law, ensuring accurate legal research and citation accuracy. It can help integrate the extracted information, categorizations, summaries, and insights seamlessly into legal research platforms, case management systems, or other relevant tools legal professionals use.

These are only a few examples of how Intelligent Document Processing can be applied across verticals. We can only expect the number of use cases to rise exponentially in the days to come.

IDP’s versatility allows organizations to optimize their document-intensive processes, improve data accuracy, enhance overall operational efficiency, enhance compliance, and free up valuable human resources from manual data processing tasks.