DF Capital is a specialist commercial lending and personal savings bank, built to serve the needs of businesses and individuals in the UK. Since its establishment in 2016, its commercial lending offering has been focused on providing inventory finance solutions to dealer and manufacturing businesses to support their working capital position. Their lending process involves securing the loan against stock: since its inception, it has provided over £2 billion of funding across diverse sectors and asset types. These include motorcycles/all-terrain vehicles; marine; agriculture; industrial, and transport. Fast decisions and payments are key elements of DF Capital's business model, reflecting its commitment to putting customer needs first, delivering growth, and acting sustainably.
Every day, DF Capital deals with a high volume of invoices from manufacturers and dealers, which require prompt processing. Like other lenders in this area, DF Capital initially relied on manual data extraction and entry to process invoices.
When customers uploaded their invoices to an online portal, a small team manually extracted the data onto their core system. This process took around 20 minutes per invoice, and a ‘four-eye check’ quality control process mandated approval from two people. As an ambitious company, DF Capital recognised that its method of manual data extraction was wasting employee resources and preventing the bank from scaling up.
However, widely-used methods of data capture, such as OCR (optical character recognition), were unlikely to yield effective results. The invoices received by the company encompass unique data fields for extraction, such as the make, model and serial number of funded assets. Consequently, OCR-based invoice extraction software would be unable to handle the complex format of these documents.
DF Capital decided to go straight to a powerful and innovative data automation solution - intelligent document processing (IDP). They reasoned that IDP could empower its staff instead of merely outsourcing the problem. Or, as Rachel Taylor, Head of Change & Continuous Improvement at DF Capital, explained: “We wanted to do the in-house processing and annotation of the invoices ourselves and keep that in-house skillset and capability”.
When comparing Evolution AI’s data extraction product with their competitors, Evolution AI impressed DF Capital with their usable and accurate proof of concept (PoC).
“We were really impressed with the usability of the system and the engagement from the team at Evolution AI.” - Rachel Taylor, Head of Change & Continuous Improvement at DF Capital.
When displayed to DF Capital’s stakeholders, the PoC model predicted all document data points with 100% accuracy. In other words, the model was completely accurate from the start, laying the groundwork for a valuable partnership between Evolution AI and DF Capital. “It was 100% accurate when extracting the data, and that just blew us away. We didn’t think that we'd get anywhere near that level of accuracy. We were really impressed,” commented Rachel Taylor.
Building upon the proof of concept model, the partnership between DF Capital and Evolution AI gathered pace. In May 2022, Evolution AI's self-service technology integrated with DF Capital's banking system. Throughout the integration process, Evolution AI's ensured a smooth technological transition for DF Capital too. Rachel Taylor commended the Evolution AI team, describing them as "really supportive - hand-holding us every step of the way."
By implementing Evolution AI's product and focussing on wider technology developments, DF Capital has been able to expand its team and redirect resources that were previously devoted to manual data extraction to more value-adding activities. Evolution AI’s technology has not only improved the bank’s productivity and efficiency in this area but has also helped the bank to meet growing customer demand.
“Evolution AI has revolutionised our document processing time and supported us with putting customer needs first, delivering growth and acting sustainably.” - Rachel Taylor, Head of Change & Continuous Improvement at DF Capital
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