ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies, today announced that CaixaBank, one of Europe’s leading banks and Spain’s third largest financial institution, has chosen ABBYY FineReader Engine, in a new project to digitise 25 million documents from Barclays bank. The move followed the bank’s recent acquisition and will deploy the software development kit (SDK) for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to digitally archive important customer information and business records.

 “Previously, we evaluated many options on the market and chose to use ABBYY’s text recognition technology when digitising our own documents because of its high accuracy rate and adaptability to a wide range of document types,” says Jorge Cortada Fernandez, BPO technology director, CaixaBank. “When CaixaBank acquired the Barclays bank business in Spain in late 2014, we wanted to digitise their 25 million legacy documents and knew from experience that ABBYY FineReader would be a good fit. To help us develop a complete solution and to deliver this project we turned to two of our technology partners - Indra BPO and Serimag Media - both of whom are experienced in image processing and document process automation. Because of our good experience we are currently evaluating future projects where we might deploy other ABBYY OCR technologies, such as in mobile document capture technology.”

The principal aim of this project was to digitise and classify bank archives and to extract specific data from the documents, such as ID or VAT number, invoice amounts and client name. The 25 million documents were delivered to Indra BPO, an outsource service provider, for scanning. The documents were of many types and include credit files, risk assessments, mortgage loan applications, requisitions, wire transfer orders, invoices, cheques, national identity cards and many others. The scanned document images were then forwarded to the Serimag solution which used ABBYY FineReader Engine for text recognition and Serimag’s tools for classifying the documents by type. Because of ABBYY FineReader Engine’s features for image pre-processing, the solution is able to correct image files before the recognition stage and to detect the presence of signatures in a contract. On many of the documents ABBYY FineReader Engine achieved a recognition rate of between 92 and 97%, saving the bank significant time in post processing. In the end the documents are archived as both searchable PDF and TIFF in CaixaBank’s enterprise content management system (ECM), easily searched for key words and quickly retrieved in the future.

“We are honoured that a leading financial institution like CaixaBank has chosen this solution,” says Mireia Casadevall, key account manager, Serimag Media. “ABBYY’s OCR technology is truly best-in-class and they have been very supportive as a vendor. It is a testament to ABBYY’s compelling value proposition that organisations like Serimag and CaixaBank can rely on their text recognition and OCR toolkits to solve such a multitude of document processing needs.”

ABBYY FineReader Engine gives developers, system integrators and BPOs the possibility to easily integrate text recognition technologies into their applications. The ABBYY recognition platform delivers award-winning OCR functionalities, intelligent character recognition (ICR), barcode, checkmark, field-level/zonal recognition and PDF conversion enabling scanned documents and images to be automatically transformed into searchable and editable document formats, such as PDF/A (1-3), XML and other formats.