November 15, 2023
Hear from data engineer Utkarsh Chodagam about how BaseCap made Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology accessible to everyone.
Advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology has unlocked tremendous advantages for industries ranging from finance and healthcare to logistics and education.
With the ability to convert various text formats into machine-readable data, OCR plays a pivotal role in integrating valuable data into systemic processes.
Now, all those forms and certificates, handwritten documents, and PDFs can plug into your data analytics engine the same way spreadsheets do.
“With the ability to convert various text formats into machine-readable data, OCR plays a pivotal role in integrating valuable data into systemic processes.”
Advanced OCR for Complex Data
OCR processes vast amounts of data with ease. The technology fosters automation, reduces human error, and promotes data accessibility. Industries dependent on managing high volumes of documents or handwritten information highly benefit from OCR. Thus, it is slowly becoming a pervasive tool in their technological arsenal.
The mortgage space is a prime example of a business that can process and manage data extremely efficiently using OCR.
Mortgage applications involve countless documents that are exchanged between multiple parties. It is crucial to process, validate, and manage this information in the most efficient way possible.
Advanced OCR technology allows us to enhance mortgage processes by automating data extraction, improving validation, and streamlining document management.
Where’s the Friction?
Despite its power, OCR can be challenging to adopt and integrate into existing processes. There are plenty of ways to leverage OCR on simple datasets. However, as the nature of the data increases in complexity, solutions that can scale accordingly are hard to come by. When evaluating the use of OCR technology on complex datasets, there are a multitude of factors that need to be considered.
- Which OCR framework is most reliable for the data we are trying to process?
- Do models already exist for the dataset that we are solving for?
- How do we build out models if they don’t exist?
- Once we have digitized datasets, how do we ingest them into existing processes?
The questions don’t end there… BaseCap’s engineers have rigorously worked to answer these questions for customers and to integrate the highest quality OCR technology into our Platform. Our team has built OCR models to extract data from complex mortgage documents and financial datasets. These same models can easily be scaled across other verticals.
Still, data extraction only marks the halfway point. The path to insightful data remains bumpy.
For instance, we noticed early on that OCR technology is far from perfect when tackling complicated datasets. Increasing complexity requires significant post-data processing and orchestration. Our teams work closely with customers to architect elaborate data pipelines so that they can access definitive data that drives critical business decisions.
In building out these OCR models and designing downstream data solutions to process extracted data, we realized that the way forward is to enable users to seamlessly operate OCR themselves. This inflection point was the introduction to our new Self-Serve OCR functionality.
Going for Gold
BaseCap users leverage various financial and mortgage models that have been carefully trained over the last couple of years. The prebuilt models can process receipts, invoices, contracts, and tax documents—perfect for OCR’s most common use cases. And now, you can train and build models on your own (with the always-there guidance of our OCR experts).
“BaseCap users leverage various financial and mortgage models that have been carefully trained over the last couple of years.”
The BaseCap Platform seamlessly integrates with multiple OCR vendors and quickly processes the output data. Data quality and business policies can be mapped to the extracted data to gain immediate insights. Moreover, customers can connect their System of Record to the Platform to dictate validation policies and drive further insights.
To facilitate efficient data handling, the BaseCap Platform has a robust framework that allows users to easily merge, segregate, and transform any dataset. This is highly beneficial for complex OCR output data that frequently requires a level of processing to ensure accurate insights.
In the OCR lifecycle, data extraction is only the first step. To drive business decisions using this data, someone must define and support processes before and after extracting these complex datasets. Fortunately, BaseCap has made it our mission to set the gold standard for complex OCR. And the cherry on top…the full power of OCR is at your fingertips.
