Process Improvement Column: New QC Software For BPOs Hits The Market
Staircase, a company building an integrated, digital infrastructure to accelerate tech-enabled mortgages, has introduced a new software that helps business process outsourcers (BPOs) reduce labor costs by improving quality control in the mortgage document verification process.
Many lenders are outsourcing certain functions to lower costs and overcome the challenges of operating remote teams. One of the main tasks outsourced to BPOs is document verification which relies heavily on manual labor and off-the-shelf optical character recognition (OCR) technology to read documents. Staircase’s Quality Control automates the document verification process by seamlessly combining a BPO’s existing OCR provider with labeling software in a tight training loop where the labeling software guesses the value of the data missed by the OCR engine, the BPO staff verify the correctness of the data, and this new ground truth feeds back into the OCR engine to improve accuracy on a daily basis. The improved extraction accuracy leads to fewer and fewer documents being sent to the manual exception handling process, saving enormous time and cost.
“Document Verification solutions that are efficient and affordable are critical to the mortgage process,” said Staircase CEO and cofounder Adam Kalamchi. “Our Quality Control product helps third parties reduce labor costs by enabling OCR to get better and better over time with a self-learning loop. We of course also include advanced data and document security to ensure privacy standards are met.”
“Staircase’s new technology monitors and improves OCR results daily, resulting in increased cost savings over time,” said Edmond Cakulla, Staircase product engineer. “It also tracks the productivity of human labelers which can be used for advanced training for current and new users.”
With Staircase’s technology, OCR providers can be easily changed in or out of the document verification process or can even be combined. The technology can be implemented in as little as one week.
Tony Garritano is the founder at PROGRESS in Lending Association. As a speaker Tony has worked hard to inform executives about how technology should be a tool used to further business objectives. For over 20 years he has worked as a journalist, researcher and speaker in the mortgage technology space. Starting PROGRESS in Lending Association was the next step for someone like Tony, who has dedicated his entire career to providing mortgage executives with the information that they need to make informed technology decisions to help their businesses succeed.
