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Visionet Systems Inc., Cranbury, N.J., formally launched a dedicated OCR competency center as a part of its Mortgage Technology Research Laboratory (MTRL)

Visionet Systems Inc., Cranbury, N.J., formally launched a dedicated OCR competency center as a part of its Mortgage Technology Research Laboratory (MTRL). Visionet’s OCR competency center will share its findings with the industry and promote use of this technology to improve reporting, compliance and data integrity. Visionet is also soliciting industry participation in various OCR initiatives in the production and servicing areas for benchmarking.

Visionet studied three such mortgage processes in detail and has found that OCR technology produced mixed results. The areas of Visionet’s focus were:

1. Legal Descriptions for Lien Releases: More than six million existing properties change hand every year. Nearly 20 percent of these releases require a legal description to be entered into lien release software such as VisiRelease. Visionet compiled a dictionary of the most used words in legal descriptions and has witnessed a 30 percent boost in the number of Releases/Legal Descriptions completed per person.

2. 1003 Data Entry: Every mortgage application has a 1003 form. Currently some customers require 100 percent blind data entry and then compare the entered data against the data from the origination system. Some customers use statistical sampling to minimize costs. The data on 1003 is critical for reporting purposes. The 1003 is a complex document containing text, check boxes and data. Visionet has found OCR to be less effective in terms of the net productivity gain when compared with 1003 manual data entry. The accuracy and productivity improved when Visionet employed two commercially available OCR engines in tandem to highlight the mismatches. This technique demanded heavy computing and image manipulation. Most businesses have ample computing power, as desktop are idle during the night. The mortgage companies should explore this method to improve doc-to-data integrity before rushing offshore.

3. Mortgage Document Indexing: When mortgage companies image various mortgage documents at various stages of application processing they often place a header page to index individual documents. The alternative, which Visionet’s clients have used over the years, is to scan the whole file into a single bucket and then use offshore resources to visually inspect each document and electronically index them. Visionet has found OCR technology to provide decent productivity boost in this area – nearly 40 percent productivity gain per employee.

For more information,

Contact:
Arshad Masood
Visionet Systems Inc.
609-452-0700 Ext. 1119
arshad@visionetsystems.com