Many businesses require extraction from ID documents, such as passports and driving licences, for identification purposes. They may need customers to submit scans of their IDs for:
Businesses carefully screen these processes in line with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations. Often, the verification process involves at least one manual element from human operators, such as comparing the identification data with public or private records.
However, verification processes are continually evolving to become faster and more user-friendly. Among the simplest elements of these automation processes is the extraction of data from passports and driving licenses.
Firms often bake manual data extraction into the cost of business. However, using highly skilled employees to complete administrative tasks is unsustainable for growing organisations. In response, technology vendors have developed various data capture tools for enterprise use over the last few years.
Of course, data management technology is only worthwhile if it is scalable. A report by Dell estimates that 43% of IT managers fear that their current IT architecture won’t be able to handle future data demands. Therefore, carefully evaluating which type of data extraction technology will serve your business better in the long term – OCR or AI – is essential.
Let’s weigh a few pros and cons. Though OCR software has a strong legacy in enterprise environments, AI is a more robust solution. AI deploys OCR and validates its output, learning from any errors so the algorithms never repeat them. In contrast, the limitations of OCR make it an unwieldy tool for organisations looking to increase the efficiency of their processes.
For example, if the output of a batch of passports contained a missing digit from the main passport number, it would be time-consuming to retrain the OCR. As for AI? Retraining the model would only require a single click.
In the last few years, strides in computational power have made it straightforward for AI to extract data from passports and driving licences. Now, advanced AI models can easily pull the relevant data from scans of passports & driving licences, including:
(See our complete list of data points that we can extract from passports and driving licences).
Regardless of the nationality of the passport or licence, AI algorithms can extract and download the data in just seconds.
One of the key advantages of AI is that it can process skewed, blurry or incomplete images. AI’s corrective capacity is beneficial in an age where most people snap casual photos of their IDs with their smartphones.
Using a third-party vendor may be a source of apprehension for organisations handling sensitive data from identification documents. Some organisations may even want to build an extraction solution to avoid risking data security.
For one, if not carefully maintained, automated data capture tools can spawn a continuous supply of errors, glitches and breakdowns. Instead, a security-conscious data extraction vendor can offer you both efficacy and safeguarded data.
You’ll also want to select a provider that regularly completes security updates on their software (find out more here). You can also confirm the vendor’s dedication to data security by checking their certifications. Examples of certifications the vendor may possess include:
This certification requires companies that handle protected health information (PHI) to adhere to physical and network security measures. Unless it’s a data extraction vendor that does other health-related documents (claims, medical records, etc.), they will be unlikely to possess a HIPAA certification.
Formerly known as ISO/IEC 27001:2022, ISO 27001 is an international standard for information security management systems.
SOC 2 is a type of audit affirming the security and management of customer data. It’s often used as an alternative or an addition to ISO 27001.
The decline in on-premise server installation means many companies are turning to cloud-based data solutions. Both options can be executed securely. The key differentiator is how your legacy architecture supports integration.
Depending on how your current IT architecture is configured, you might find it easier to connect to extraction technology via API. API, or Application Programming Interface, is a series of communication protocols that connects two programs.
However, there are other flexible options for integration, including using a connective tool like Zapier or Workato. You might also use Secure File Transfer (SFT), which encrypts data between the client and the vendor’s servers.
Ultimately, there is no need to compromise data security for integration quality. Speak to a vendor for more information.
The simple answer: yes.
More insightfully, the most acute extraction algorithms are powered by AI algorithms that can make context-relevant decisions. If reading long documents that contain passport scans, AI algorithms will detect clues that indicate the page containing the ID document. For example, the algorithms will note that the page contains a photo of a face, a country of issue, etc. This phenomenon is known as classification.
It’s worth noting that AI-powered extraction tools excel at auto-detecting the language of passports. Regardless of whether the passports are in Cantonese or Portuguese, AI-powered language algorithms should detect and extract the language.
Some vendors can consider custom requests, depending on the extraction model and the scope of the request. Custom requests we often receive include:
When in doubt, don’t be afraid to ask.
Before deciding whether automating data capture from passports and driving licences is right for your business, consider the following:
Even midsized organisations waste hundreds if not thousands of pounds each year on manual data extraction or inferior data extraction technology.
In contrast, presenting your staff with actionable data will boost your business’s productivity. For example, Evolution AI reduced invoice processing time by 90% for DF Capital Bank. As a result, they could expand their team and redirect resources to more value-adding activities.
In addition, Evolution AI is:
If you’d like to discuss the benefits of automated data extraction from passports and driving licences for your organisation, please book a demo or contact our team at hello@evolution.ai.
