Small and medium-sized businesses in Malaysia are the focus of a new partnership between enterprise content capture and data discovery solution provider Ephesoft and Alliance Bank Malaysia Berhad. The pact, announced today, heralds the integration of Ephesoft’s intelligent capture automation technology, Transact, into Alliance Bank’s middle office operations.

Alliance Bank Group CEO Joel Kornreich praised the way Ephesoft’s technology helps it manage the high volume of high-value documents it deals with every day. “Ephesoft is able to meet our requirements and is versatile to scale with us as we continue to transform our business processes to deliver faster, simpler, and more responsive customer experience to our clients,” he said.

Kornreich added that the technology will also enable Alliance Bank to better defend itself and its customers against fraudulent activity. “We also use the information (from customer transactions) to perform financial casting to understand our customers better, and due diligence in assessing customers,” he explained.

Ephesoft Transact enables businesses to accurately and quickly convert unstructured data in documents into actionable information. The technology leverages human-supervised machine learning to examine documents ranging from mortgage applications to insurance claims and to extract required data from them.

Transact improves in efficiency over time, becoming more “intelligent” with every correction, new layout, or new document type. The solution is available as both an on-premise option, running on Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Red Hat servers, as well as via the cloud courtesy of Ephesoft’s Cloud HyperExtender add-in.

“Ephesoft’s machine learning-powered software enables Alliance Bank employees to accelerate tedious processes and use their time to bring value to the organization in strategic ways that provide a competitive advantage,” company founder and CEO Ike Kavas said.

The company’s partnership news comes one month after it announced a collaboration with Thailand-based insurance company, Tokio Marine Asia. The month before, Ephesoft unveiled a pact with automation-driven, IT, BPO, and consulting service provider Hexaware. The company will combine Ephesoft’s intelligent data capture technology with Hexaware’s own robotic process automation-based solutions to enhance a wide variety of business processes.

“Many organizations suffer from having a tremendous amount of untouched, unstructured data that they either don’t use or must manually process,” Kavas said when the Hexaware partnership was announced. “We solve those challenges so that companies can be nimble, efficient, and accurate using modern tactics.”

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Irvine, California, Ephesoft demonstrated its Capture-as-a-Service platform for smart document capture at FinovateSpring 2018. With customers in more than 50 countries, and partnerships with 250+ fintechs, integrators, solution partners, and resellers, the company has raised $15 million in funding from investors including Mercato Partners.

The newly-announced partnership between Ephesoft and Tokio Marine Asia demonstrates how fintech and insurtech are playing a role in the advancement of Thai language recognition technology. Tokio Marine Asia, the regional headquarters of Japan’s first life insurance company, will collaborate with the enterprise content capture and data discovery solutions provider to bring greater automation to the Thai insurance market.

Ephesoft’s technology leverages supervised machine learning to automate the classification and extraction of key information from unstructured data. The technology is sensitive enough to recognize document types and the machine learning system requires only two to five samples of the data in order to perform. Faster data extraction, with fewer opportunities for manual entry-based error, gives businesses in a variety of industries lower costs, deeper insight into business trends, and the ability to offer improved service to customers.

“We hope that by using Ephesoft, we will be able to alleviate manual data entry and streamline processes, accelerating our claim processing to provide better customer service,” VP and head of digital strategy of Tokio Marine Asia Hidemi Harada said.

In addition to bringing digital efficiencies to the Thai insurance industry, the partnership hopes to break new ground in the analysis of Thai language unstructured data. Pledging to overcome data, document, and language challenges that are “prevalent throughout Thailand,” Ephesoft CEO and founder Ike Kavas said, “Ephesoft has a strong commitment to meeting our customers where they are and addressing their unique challenges, regardless of geographic location.” Harada added that the collaboration will help them “gain a deeper level of understanding for characters and language, which has been a long-time challenge to international business in Thailand.”

The deal with Tokio Marine Asia is the latest partnership from Ephesoft, which unveiled a major alliance with Grant Thornton over the summer. That partnership will enable Grant Thornton to make Ephesoft Smart Capture available to its customers to improve back office operations such as invoicing, accounts payable, and contract management.

Last month, Ephesoft announced that it had partnered with IT, BPO, and consulting services firm Hexaware Technologies to help businesses successfully undertake automation-led, process transformations. In September, the company announced that it was collaborating with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) specialist Automation Anywhere to help customers take advantage of the combined benefits of RPA and document capture technologies.

Ephesoft demonstrated its smart document capture and analytics platform at FinovateSpring 2018, highlighting how the technology leverages data mining and analytics to enhance mortgage document processing. Founded in 2010, the company has raised $15 million in funding and includes Mercato Partners among its investors.

Enterprise content capture and data discovery solution provider Ephesoft has partnered with Chicago, Illinois-based accounting consultancy Grant Thornton. The firm now offers Ephesoft Smart Capture to its customers to help them enhance back office operations, including invoicing, accounts payable, and contract management. The solution also will improve the ability of companies to manage more challenging processes such as tax calculations and revenue recognition.

“Ephesoft’s patented, supervised machine learning technology reduces the overall document processing time by an average of 65% and increases employee productivity by as much as 400%,” Ephesoft founder and CEO Ike Kavas explained. “Now we can work with Grant Thornton to help more clients in more locations gain control over their documents and unstructured data.”

Advisory practice leader for Grant Thornton’s central region Nick Vellani added that the technology would help businesses deal with the problem of not just managing but actually leveraging large amounts of unstructured data to produce valuable insights. He praised Ephesoft’s technology and its ability to help alleviate these “workflow and collaboration nightmares.”

“When we saw how easily the Ephesoft Smart Capture platform plugged into our tech environments – and the benefits it provided to our professionals – we knew it was something our clients could benefit from as well,” Vellani said.

It’s worth noting that Grant Thornton is no newcomer to Ephesoft’s technology. In addition to using the company’s technology in-house to enhance the tax services it provides to clients, Grant Thornton also has deployed Ephesoft’s technology for “several clients” to help them improve their tax functions, as well.

Founded in 1924, Grant Thornton is the U.S. member firm of Grant Thornton International, a global professional services network of independent accounting and consulting companies. With revenues of more than $1.8 billion and 58 offices across the U.S., Grant Thornton provides auditing, tax planning, and financial advisory services in a wide variety of verticals including financial services, private equity, and real estate, as well as transportation, manufacturing, and retail.

Named One of the Best Places to Work in Orange County, by the Orange Country Business Journal and the Orange Country Register, Ephesoft demonstrated its cloud-based, smart document capture and analytics platform at FinovateSpring 2018. The technology identifies documents and extracts the relevant data, transforming unstructured content into actionable information. The platform also leverages data mining and analytics to provide valuable business intelligence to help institutions make better decisions and manage risk more effectively.

Ephesoft began the year with the launch of its Cloud HyperExtender add-on, which enables users of the company’s Transact technology to boost processing speeds up to 2,500 pages per minute. More recently, company CEO Kavas was named a semifinalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2019 Award in Orange County.

Headquartered in Irvine, California, Ephesoft was founded in 2010. The company has raised $15 million in funding courtesy of a Series A round in 2017 led by Mercato Partners.

When the going gets tough, the tough take to the cloud.

Enterprise content capture and data solution provider Ephesoft unveiled its Ephesoft Cloud HyperExtender today. The new technology enables Ephesoft Transact users to optimize their on-premise solution by more than 10x, bringing processing speeds up to 2,500 pages per minute to satisfy instances of peak demand.

An add-on application, the Cloud Hyperextender combines high-performance cloud image processing with Transact’s supervised machine learning, shifting processing intensive Optical Character Recognition (OCR) operations to the cloud once documents are captured on-premise. After processing, the documents are returned to the on-premise system for classification, extraction, validation, and export.

Click the image above to see a YouTube video of the Cloud HyperExtender in action.

The solution is designed to help companies meet peak demand which “stress(es) the infrastructure for document intelligence,” the company noted in a statement. Retailers experiencing surges in invoices and credit card applications during shopping holidays and tax preparation companies managing heavy processing during tax season are among the examples of how the technology can be deployed.

“Ephesoft’s Cloud HyperExtender is bridging the gap for our customers who want to continue using their existing systems while reaping the benefits of ultra-fast processing in the cloud,” company founder and CEO Ike Kavas said. “This first-to-market offering provides the best of both worlds. As the world’s first hybrid capture microservice, this product maximizes efficiency and profitability for our customers and epitomizes our vision to lead the market to the cloud.”

Above: Scott Lee (Senior Product Manager) and Chris MacWilliams (Lead Solution Engineer) demonstrating the Ephesoft platform at FinovateSpring 2018.

Ephesoft demonstrated its smart document capture and analytics platform at FinovateSpring 2018. The firm has hundreds of customers in more than 50 countries who rely on the company’s technology – including its Ephesoft Insight document analytics and business intelligence solution – to become more productive and efficient, as well as boost ROI.

Earning a finalist spot in the 2019 Cloud Awards Program in the Best Cloud Automation Solution category last month, Ephesoft was named a 2018 Top Workplace by the Orange County Register. Over the summer, Ephesoft was recognized as a Hot Vendor in Document and Contract Analytics, 2018, and launched its Swagger/OpenAPI-web services for Ephesoft Transact. This simplified API makes it easy to integrate Ephesoft’s document capture solutions into openAPI-compliance platforms such as Microsoft Flow.

Ephesoft has raised $15 million in funding, courtesy of a Series A round led by Mercato Partners. Founded in 2010, the company is headquartered in Irvine, California with offices in the U.K., Germany, France, Australia, Singapore, and Italy.