As we do every year, we take stock of everything we have achieved during 2021 and look ahead with the determination to continue growing.
2021 has undoubtedly been a year to remember in the history of Serimag.
Despite the situation caused by COVID-19, we have continued to grow, adding new clients and new projects in another record year for the company. Serimag has been a key player at national level in the process of granting ICO loans for several entities in the country, we have supported our client Caixabank in the absorption of Bankia and along the way we have had to adapt to a remote way of working.
Increased volumes and projects
During 2021 we will process almost 500M pages in the nearly 100 processes we have in production for our customers and adding new document types to our portfolio. We continue to add new projects and processes, adding new document types and increasing the percentages of automation in all our projects thanks to the work of the R&D department of Serimag.
At the company level we are growing in all 3 directions, both in number of clients, number of projects per client and volumes of existing projects. A sample of the potential of TAAD Automation, through which we are achieving great savings for our customers.
ICO Loans – A critical project executed in record time
Special mention should be made of the ICO lending project for 2020-21, of which we are particularly proud for several reasons. As a result of COVID-19, the Spanish Government decided to mitigate its effects through guarantees that facilitated credit and liquidity to companies and the self-employed. Endowed with 100 billion euros, the Council of Ministers activated these guarantees in tranches. This led to a flood of applications from these companies and freelancers. The first tranche of €20 billion was marketed in just 2 days. CaixaBank, for example, received tens of thousands of applications for the first tranche. This meant a huge amount of operations and documents to be processed in short periods of time. Serimag was able, in less than 3 weeks and in a process where part of the documentation was new and specific to that process, to put an Automatic Document Processing system into production that in a few weeks achieved automation rates of over 75%. In this project Serimag worked hand in hand with BPO partners for the manual completion part.
In addition to Caixabank, Serimag has also been the partner chosen by Banco Santander and BBVA for the management of ICO loans, making Serimag the leading BPO by volume in Spain in the processing of these applications, having handled approximately two thirds of the applications generated at the national level.
By implementing TAAD, it was possible to put the system into production in record time, significantly shorten the Average Operational Time per file and drastically reduce the costs that a manual approach would have entailed.
The Caixabank – Bankia Merger
On the other hand, Serimag has been a critical ally for the absorption process of Bankia (and its processes), for which the volumes of documentation of the different core processes of the entity have increased significantly.
The merger was announced in 2020 but it was not until the end of 2021 that the technological integration became effective. Thanks to TAAD Automation it has not been necessary for Caixabank to have additional BPO resources, the increase in volumes has been absorbed by the improvements in the Automation percentages of the different projects.
In addition, as part of the integration and due to compliance issues, we have supported the entity in several projects for the review of customer documentation, both at the individual and corporate level. These projects have been carried out in an agile and very economical manner. Under a process outsourcing scheme to a BPO such projects would probably have been dismissed due to cost and time issues.
BBVA and Santander Projects
On the other hand, we are very pleased to have put into production several recurring projects, in addition to the ICO projects, with Banco Santander and BBVA. Specifically, we are automating processes related to Transfers, Real Estate Appraisals and Taxes. We hope throughout 2022/23 to continue adding projects within these clients and accompany them in their Digital Transformation as we have already achieved with our client Caixabank.
We continue to learn
Serimag’s R&D team continues to focus on improving project automation rates to achieve greater savings for our customers. Therefore, during 2021 we have continued to research new techniques and training models. Through the improvements added throughout the year, we have managed to raise the average Automation rate of all current projects from 76% to almost 80%.
We highlight the progress achieved in;
In general terms, we continue to investigate new NPL techniques and the use of CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) in our learning models. On the other hand, a new field of research in which we already have processes in production is that of Fraud through document forgery. More news on this topic soon.
Launching new projects in the Insurance Sector
We are very happy to have made the leap to the insurance sector, with a first project with a very important client in the sector such as ARAG, a German insurance group with more than €2B of turnover.
This is a first project for the processing of mail associated with declarations of loss, contracting, queries and renewals. Processing all the information sent by customers and structuring it for automatic processing.
Our strategic plan includes the objective of opening up new industries, and we certainly see a huge potential for Document Process Automation in the insurance industry.
We consolidate our BPO service offering to provide an integrated service
On the other hand, since 3 years ago and at the request of several of our customers, Serimag began to offer the service of manual completion – BPO 2.0 – in order to provide a comprehensive service. This service is provided by Serimag employees, who use manual debugging applications developed in-house by Serimag and integrated with the TAAD Automation system. It has been very well received and during 2021 we have added more employees to this division in order to ensure our customers a complete and agile service.
Ready for what is to come
In Serimag we are excited to continue growing with our present and future customers, to accompany them on their way to Digital Transformation. We feel very confident in our proposal and we are very proud to consolidate our position as a national reference in Document Process Automation through Artificial Intelligence. We are determined to continue growing by adding customers, partners and talent for many years to come.
