Interview in elEconomista.es

This month the newspaper elEconomista has included in its central pages the supplement “Tecnología XXI“, which includes several companies with an innovative and disruptive technological proposal. Among them, it echoes the work that Serimag is doing in recent years to automate and accelerate business processes thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

We leave you here the article, which you can also access through its website, by clicking here.

For more than eight years, Serimag has been working with the most advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and putting into production automation solutions for its customers’ document processes, aimed at achieving their objectives.

What can AI offer in the field of automation and document processing?

Users and the market are demanding companies to automate their processes in order to be competitive and we believe that Artificial Intelligence is the only technology that allows the implementation of truly productive and reliable automatic systems. If robotization aims to mimic human behavior, AI goes further by allowing it to mimic reasoning.

What outstanding advantages does it introduce in this field?

Technologies such as OCR or RPA already exist, but the real world is much more complex than they can handle. A first advantage over them is that there is no implicit rule-by-rule programming: the machine learns from previous experience. This results in a system that is much easier to maintain. The second major advantage is that, thanks to this learning, robustness to a greater number of scenarios and exceptions is acquired, which means achieving better automation ratios and greater reliability.

On that basis, what solutions has Serimag created?

More than a product, Serimag offers a document processing service. Based on our knowledge of different technologies and accumulated experience, we create a customized solution: we sit down with the client, understand the needs, reflect on the best way to address the problem, develop the solution and finally put it into production with constant online management. It is a whole process of document reengineering in which we accompany the client from the beginning and while the service is running.

In which sectors can this type of solution provide the most value? What profile of customers already trust Serimag?

There are certain sectors, such as banking and insurance, that are very demanding of document processes. Your business is based on operations, and these operations are based on documents. Increasing their benefits, whether economic or improvements in the user experience, is part of making these document processes more efficient. The country’s major financial institutions, Santander, BBVA and CaixaBank, have been relying on us for more than eight years. Sectors such as telecommunications or utilities are perfect candidates to follow the same path.

Its business model is based on a pay-per-use basis.

Rather on a pay-per-success basis: we invoice only for what the system manages to automate correctly. On the one hand, we want the customer to link the costs to their own production, being aware that those operations rejected by the system will have to be referred to a manual operator and should not incur double costs. We aim to create a win-win relationship with the customer where greater automation means greater mutual benefit.

The greater the automation, the greater the benefit to the customer?

Undoubtedly, but let’s define benefit. The most obvious is economic, where we typically achieve reductions of up to 50%, although this is not usually what our clients are most concerned about. Others, such as the time factor, where we transform batch processes into online processes, are critical. There are even regulatory and normative compliances for which these types of technologies are levers that make it possible to address or not address these problems.

What objectives has Serimag set in its proposal to companies in Spain?

We can say, without fear of being wrong, that today we are one of the leaders in Spain in terms of digital back office services. But there is still a long way to go, since transforming the core processes of large corporations is no trivial matter. We want to consolidate our position in the sectors in which we are already present, but also open up new markets. And not only in Spain, but also internationally, as in Portugal, where we are already established.

The Digital Transformation of companies is not only based on placing pieces of technology in their processes, but also on making a change of mentality towards digital. The end user has already made that change. The traditional process must be reinvented to adapt and automation is a key part of this. Serimag wants to be the ally of companies in this change, both for the potential of our technology and for our service proposal.

How will you continue to work in the future to bring innovation and efficiency to document processes?

R&D is part of our DNA. In fact, this whole project was born from a research group at universities. With them, together with important research centers such as the Barcelona Supercomputing Center or the Computer Vision Center, we continue to work together to further evolve our technology, both for future projects and current ones already in production. New types of neural networks, better understanding of complex and unstructured documents, more efficient ways and higher computational performance… We are working on several fronts.