Instabase: Transforming the Banking Industry with Applied AI
In the current era of digitalisation, the banking industry encounters a multitude of obstacles when it comes to handling vast amounts of unorganised data across its diverse business operations. The manual handling and extraction of information from complex and ever-changing documents can consume considerable time and be susceptible to errors. Nevertheless, thanks to the emergence of applied artificial intelligence, financial institutions now can harness state-of-the-art technologies to mechanise entire processes and enhance overall business results.
Instabase, a prominent technology company, has positioned itself as a game changer in the financial services sector. Anant Bhardwaj, the founder of Instabase, describes Instabase as an operating system for automating intricate banking business processes. It was founded in 2015 when he was a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bhardwaj highlights the similarity in banking problems such as common document-related challenges. For example, almost all banks process similar types of documents when dealing with loans.
Instabase targets its applications at specific geographies and industries. For instance, it develops useful applications for banks in the United States, taking advantage of the fact that banks in different regions share similar problems and needs. Through its inventive platform, Instabase has effectively gained more than half of the United States’ top ten financial institutions and a multitude of global banks as its clients. By blending cutting-edge AI advancements with deep industry knowledge, Instabase empowers providers of financial services to enhance profitability and elevate customer experiences through the application of AI.
Instabase collaborated with third parties like Microsoft. This partnership benefited Microsoft by allowing them to reach customers using various cloud providers on the Instabase platform, even if they are not on Azure. Instabase offers a simple developer experience. The developers can use their preferred programming languages, with Python being the most used language. The backend logic can be added to applications, and custom user interfaces can be built in.
Instabase offers a comprehensive suite of solutions designed specifically for the financial services sector by leveraging applied AI. These solutions address critical pain points faced by banks, including accelerating client onboarding, achieving regulatory compliance, speeding up loan decisions, improving risk management, automating document processing, and so on. By leveraging deep learning, machine learning technology and natural language processing, Instabase enables financial institutions to easily access data confined in even the most complex and unstructured documents. This allows them to automate data extraction and drive better business outcomes.
Use cases in the banking sector.
Instabase’s platform has discovered massive applications across various banking territories. Some of them include the following:
Client Onboarding: Instabase helps financial institutions eliminate or greatly reduce manual reviews of unstructured documents during client onboarding processes. Instabase enables banks to speed up client onboarding while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements by extracting relevant data from unstructured documents with a high degree of accuracy.
Client Service: Instabase enables banks to enhance customer experiences by eliminating process bottlenecks and speeding up response times. By automating document processing and data extraction, banks can provide faster and more accurate responses to customer inquiries.
One of the key challenges in banking is dealing with a wide range of document types, such as pay cheques, tax documents, and bank statements. Instabase employs advanced AI models to extract relevant information from these documents, even when they have varying layouts and structures. This capability enables banks to automate document-based tasks, such as income verification, more effectively.
Automated Loan Processing: Instabase can streamline lending process approval for banks. When a customer applies for a loan, there are numerous documents to be collected and reviewed. Instabase uses AI and document understanding to quickly gather and interpret these documents. This significantly reduces processing time and improves overall customer experience.
Payments: With Instabase, banks can automate payment processing by extracting relevant information from invoices, receipts, and other payment-related documents. This helps minimise errors and ensures timely payment processing.
Credit Scoring and Fraud Detection: Instabase can integrate with external systems to make API (Application Programming Interface) calls for credit scoring. Additionally, it can analyse historical data and fraud information to detect suspicious activities or applications. Banks can make more informed lending decisions and reduce fraud by combining AI-driven insights with traditional data sources.
Workflow Automation: Instabase offers a low-code platform called Flow Builder, which allows banks to automate their business workflows. This is especially valuable for complex banking processes that involve multiple steps and decision points. Banks can design, build, and deploy these workflows to optimise their operations.
Learn more about Instabase’s AI Hub.
Version Control: Given the regulatory nature of the banking sector, Instabase provides version control mechanisms to ensure compliance with industry standards. This allows banks to track changes to their automated processes and maintain an audit trail for regulatory purposes.
Security and Compliance: Instabase prioritises security and compliance by allowing organisations to install it within their premises, whether in the cloud or on-premises. Data remains under the control of the customer, and encryption and access control mechanisms are in place to protect sensitive information. Billing is handled within the customer’s environment. Instabase does not require customers to send data to their servers, maintaining data sovereignty and privacy. This is crucial for maintaining trust and flexibility in meeting stringent data protection requirements.
Instabase has become a pivotal figure in the banking industry, leveraging the power of applied AI and machine learning and offering tools like Flow Builder to create flexible workflows. Its containerisation approach and additional primitives ensure portability and adaptability across different deployment environments, making it a versatile solution to automate complex operations and enhance business results significantly. Its platform provides holistic solutions that effectively tackle challenges confronted by financial institutions across diverse areas. Through the automation of tasks such as document processing, data extraction, and workflow management, Instabase enables banks to attain heightened efficiency, superior risk management, regulatory compliance, and elevated customer experiences.
This article was written with the help of ChatGPT and Bing Chat.
About the author:
Rosemary J Thomas, PhD, is a Senior Technical Researcher at the Version 1 AI Labs.
