Online bank

Online bank ensures compliance-compliant mail processing with Caya

Discover how a renowned German neobank is optimising its processes and meeting strict compliance requirements by digitising its mail and automating content recognition.

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Challenge

Despite their extensive digital offerings, banks still receive a large volume of physical mail every day. This includes customer correspondence such as account closures, as well as legal documents, insolvency notices, and attachment orders, all of which must be processed quickly and in compliance with regulations to meet deadlines. No letter can be left sitting around by mistake. To tackle this challenge, the online bank digitised its own mail.

Staff then reviewed the digital documents and manually entered them into the relevant software. This approach was extremely time-consuming and costly, as the bank receives over 10,000 letters a month – a figure that is still rising. To ensure every letter is automatically routed correctly while reducing the enormous workload involved, the bank sought a professional service provider for its entire inbound mail processing.

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Requirements

The provider was tasked with collecting mail from a bank location or directly from Deutsche Post, digitising it, extracting data, and assigning it to the correct workflows based on the content. The provider was given over 100 relevant terms to help identify the appropriate process. Furthermore, the provider was to filter out letters from around 40 specific senders and deliver them to the bank unopened. Additionally, depending on the content, some letters were to be destroyed after digitisation, others physically archived, and some returned to the bank in their original form.

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Solution

To ensure that workflow identification based on letter content is largely automated, Caya uses machine learning technologies that were initially trained manually. Specifically, letters containing one of the relevant terms were tagged and linked to the corresponding processing logic. Depending on the keywords found, documents are transferred to various folders on the Caya platform or into industry-specific solutions via interfaces. Caya has stored these rules for all terms, enabling almost complete automation of the processing.

Since January 2022, Caya has been collecting the bank's mail several times a day using its own courier from a bank location or the Deutsche Post distribution centre and taking it to one of its scanning centres. Here, letters that the bank wishes to receive unopened, such as correspondence from the works council, are sorted out and returned with the next courier run. The remaining items are digitised, read, and classified using the trained machine learning technologies to feed them into the appropriate processes. Finally, depending on the content, Caya either destroys the letters in accordance with data protection regulations or returns them to the bank.

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Result

Caya processes the bank's mail within a few hours and transfers the digital documents, including the extracted data, to the relevant workflows within that timeframe. This has significantly reduced the burden on the client's staff. Furthermore, the new workflow ensures that deadlines are met and all correspondence is processed in compliance with regulations. Detailed reporting and dashboards provided by Caya also support this, offering constant insight into the volume of incoming mail, its location, and current processing status. This allows the bank to remain fully informed at all times and intervene if a process stalls.

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