Ondato, a technology company that streamlines AML and KYC processes, has begun marketing its highly accurate, AI-powered OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology as a stand-alone solution for other ID vendors. Ondato’s OCR automatically identifies and uses relevant personal information from identity documents during onboarding. 

The powerful, precise and swift technology, which is embedded in Ondato’s own identity verification and business onboarding solutions, is now available as an API integration for use by third parties. It reads and digitalises over 10,000 document templates in less than a second with up to 99.8% accuracy. It automatically feeds the data to any system - a CRM for example - database or tool, delivering significantly faster KYC and AML compliance during onboarding by organisations anywhere in the world and across all sectors.  

OCR is a technology that automatically reads data from documents - or photos of documents - containing text. It makes it easier and faster to read and check papers, which otherwise have to be verified manually by staff during onboarding and other vital business processes. The technology is evolving rapidly today, fuelled by the application of Artificial Intelligence to add greater accuracy and new automation capabilities.

Ondato’s AI-powered OCR is effective on nearly all languages and alphabets, including special characters, non-latin scripts, and on ideograms used in writing systems such as Chinese, and can be used  across 186 countries. Accuracy is as high as 99.8% on materials of European origin and even poor-quality source documents can be made legible.

Liudas Kanapienis, CEO and co-founder of Ondato, says: “We know the challenges other ID vendors have when training their OCR engines to perform accurately across multiple languages and scripts, and a never-ending tide of new document templates. Ondato’s in-house AI- and ML-powered OCR specialises in ID documents, unlike OCR from other providers, and is now best-in-class. It gets more accurate every day and without human interaction automatically learns new document types based on pre-existing logic. Our technology is so flexible that we can add new documents or characters in just two weeks and instantly achieve over 90% accuracy. We are now opening up this solution to any organisation, including our competitive market. We believe, that quality of service provision in KYC is crucial as we all work with a vision to make digital world a fraud-free space.”

As well as its global text capabilities, Ondato’s technology can also read QR (Quick Response) codes, VIZ (Visual inspection zone), PDF417 barcodes, and MRZ (Machine readable zone) encrypted information, and cross-checks the information between all of those to return only validated data. Additional document template requests can be fulfilled within five working days.

To ensure compliance with data protection regulations, such as the European Union’s GDP legislation, data is only stored on Ondato’s customers’ servers once the process is complete. If needed for audit purposes, Ondato also offers a cloud repository for storage. Additional security, fraud, and spoofing checks can be carried out as needed.