Automating Commercial Lending Through OCR Technology

BY MICHAEL FUCHS

With banks bracing themselves for a potential economic slowdown, commercial lending remains the backbone of banking. But, will looming challenges such as rising interest rates, growing pressure from fintechs and increased demands from customers change all that?

To ensure commercial lending continues to be a strong source of revenue, banks need to focus on investments that will help them capture and retain strong borrowers, make better credit decisions and accurately differentiate risk across their commercial lending portfolio. However, lenders face an ongoing challenge in accurately entering the considerable volume of tax return data needed to assess a prospective borrower’s credit worthiness.

Wolters Kluwer’s latest addition to its CASH Suite™ solutions set, CASH Tax Importer™, helps lenders efficiently manage the considerable volume of tax return data needed to assess a prospective borrower’s credit worthiness.

When used in conjunction with Wolters Kluwer’s CASH Insight™ module, CASH Tax Importer eliminates time-consuming manual entry and helps reduce data errors, as well as increases the speed at which lenders can make lending decisions for their customers.

CASH Tax Importer also leverages Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to extract and import the information from tax returns to PDF or image files.

Additional benefits of CASH Tax Importer’s OCR technology include:

• Enhanced customer experience. OCR turns content into searchable data and significantly increases lender efficiency. 
• Improved employee satisfaction and retention. OCR enhances job satisfaction by engaging lenders’ time on things that matter instead of being bogged down with administrative and clerical tasks. 
• More precise and accurate analysis by the underwriting team. OCR ensures that decisions aren’t rushed because the lender ran out of time due to entering data manually.

Michael Fuchs is director of Commercial Lending at Wolters Kluwer, where he is focused on helping financial institutions grow their commercial lending portfolios through sound risk management and compliance practices. Fuchs specializes in helping banks and credit unions implement automated solutions and strategies that make their commercial lending processes more efficient and compliant with regulatory and industry rules. He can be reached at [email protected].

Lynne Pearce
[email protected]