Visionet Systems Inc. Launches Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Competency Center for the Mortgage Industry.

    /24-7PressRelease/ - CRANBURY, NJ, June 08, 2005 - Visionet Systems Inc. has formally launched a dedicated OCR competency center as a part of its Mortgage Technology Research Laboratory (MTRL). While OCR technology has been around for a while, is robust, and continues to mature, it is a challenge to integrate this technology into mortgage processes to improve productivity and reduces errors. 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 does not develop or sell OCR engines - it uses commercially available general-purpose engines.

The mortgage industry heavily relies on paper-based processes. Mortgage documents are generated at various stages in the mortgage value chain and come from multiple vendors and partners. There are custom forms as well. The industry has embraced imaging and is now ready to automate document-to-data entry and integrity aspects of the business. Many mortgage companies have chosen to offshore the data entry and document-to-data integrity processes. Visionet has been providing similar offshore data entry services to the mortgage industry for a number of years and has compiled comprehensive data on human versus OCR metrics specific to the mortgage vertical.

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: Over six million existing properties change hand every year. Approximately twenty percent of these releases require a legal description to be entered into lien release software such as VisiRelease. Visionet has compiled a comprehensive dictionary of the most used words in legal descriptions and has witnessed a 30% 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% 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 - approximately 40% productivity gain per employee.

Visionet invites and welcomes industry participants in the following areas:

1. Mortgage clients who are interested in 1003 and Mortgage Note data extraction and reporting automation, e.g. HMDA.
2. 1009 - Reverse Mortgages
3. OCR based automated document tracking for specific mortgage products.

"It is an absolute win-win for our clients and Visionet," explained Arshad Masood, president of Visionet Systems Inc. We look forward to hearing from customers looking to extract the most out their Document Imaging investment.

ABOUT VISIONET SYSTEMS INC.
Visionet has spent the last decade working with the top mortgage companies in the country, building various mortgage industry-specific products and solutions. Visionet products include VisiRelease (lien release), VisiCompliance (post-close compliance automation, loan boarding and special loan setup), VisiEscrow (escrow float and shortage management), VisiView (customer/product analytics and reporting), and other mortgage industry solutions. All solutions are web and workflow based, utilizing the best in operations research and are designed to manage outsourced and in-house operations from a single portal.

CONTACT:
Arshad Masood
Visionet Systems Inc.
609-452-0700 Ext. 1119
[email protected]
http://www.visionetsystems.com

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