Best of Show: Kofax
Turning smartphones and tablets into “powerful customer engagement platforms” is the project of mobile capture specialist, Kofax.
It is also the technology for which the company was awarded its first Best of Show trophy at FinovateAsia in Singapore in November.
Kofax Mobile Capture puts the company’s innovations in image perfection, data extraction, and validation technology to work at what the company calls the “point of origination.” By leveraging the camera technology on the average smartphone or tablet, Kofax empowers users to capture a diverse range of documents and data – including photographs – and transmit them securely and safely to business apps and workflows.
To see Kofax’s Best of Show winning demo, click here.
Why They Won:
- In an era of shoppers taking photographs of newly-empty cans and jars instead of scribbling out an old-fashioned grocery list, audiences see Kofax Mobile Capture and they get it. Finding new ways to put our precious smart devices to use will be a winning plan for innovators in the fintech space for some time.
Bottom Line:
- The big question for Kofax is how will they continue to leverage the functionality of smartphones and smart devices to make information and data travel more efficiently for consumers and businesses. Fortunately, the company provided a few clues in their demo – and a few more in our interview below.
Interview with Drew Hyatt, Senior Vice President, Mobility, Kofax
Finovate: Why do you think Kofax won Best of Show at FinovateAsia 2013?
Drew Hyatt: Kofax Mobile Capture technology won because it’s a very unique solution that gives consumers the ability to turn the cameras on their smart phones into advanced, real-time scanning/input devices.
This was the first time the solution was shown to the financial community in Asia and the response was incredibly positive. Attendees were very impressed with how the solution can scan a driver’s license or other forms of ID and documents, extract that data, send it back to consumers for validation, and then insert it into the systems of record or whatever type of workflow the financial institution is using. Once they saw the entire process in action, it all made sense.
Finovate: One of the concepts emphasized from the stage in Singapore was the idea of the expanding capabilities of smart devices, especially smart phones, as a key innovation driver, from document capture to authentication. Is there smart device functionality that has been overlooked and has yet to be tapped into?
Drew: Yes. What we’ve developed is still in the very early stages of implementation. Right now the camera is primarily being used to get information from documents and IDs. But in the future, we’ll be able to capture and extract critical data from images of objects and goods and services.
We’ll also see more applications evolve as the processors in the mobile device become more powerful. Essentially everyone will have a very powerful laptop or server in their hands, which will enhance the types of features that financial institutions are able to offer customers.
Finovate: From the stage in Singapore, you teased a few features that you were not able to demo in the allotted time. Can you elaborate on some of those features and use cases?
Drew: One of those use cases was giving customers the ability to pay bills or enter bill information into the bank’s payment system. There’s a growing segment of consumers who don’t like to type information on computers and who just want to tap on options on their mobile devices.
Kofax is eliminating the need to read, copy and type information from bills and enter data manually into fields. The technology is enabling consumers to automate the process and save time by simply capturing and extracting the information with one photo.
Finovate: What can we look forward to from Kofax over the next 3-6 months?
Drew: Kofax has a wide range of products it will be introducing in the near future. Most of these innovations center around expanding the use of consumers’ cameras to make their lives easier while making data capture and data management processes for financial institutions shorter, more efficient and more cost effective.
MasterCard 
