Earlier this week, SS&C Technologies Holdings (SSNC.Q) agreed to acquire Captricity, which makes the data transformation platform, Vivado.
Based in Oakland, California, Captricity offers a machine learning solution that enables fast, scalable and accurate extraction of handwritten and machine-printed data from paper documents, and digitizes it.
“The financial and healthcare industries are challenged by the abundance of manual paper-based transactions, often including significant amounts of handwritten data. The addition of Vidado and Captricity’s team will complement SS&C’s business process outsourcing (BPO) services and our AWD business process management solution. We look forward to working with Vidado’s talented team to continue to deliver intelligent solutions,” said Bill Stone, chairman and CEO of SS&C.
SS&C and your data
SS&C provides software and services for the financial services and healthcare industries. They’ve been around since 1986, and are headquartered in Windsor, Connecticut with offices around the world. They’re commonly used by 18,000 financial services and healthcare organizations from the world’s largest companies to small and mid-market firms.
Captricity’s Vidado is a cloud-based, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven, intelligent automation platform used to identify, digitize, validate and enrich data. It does so better than optical character recognition (OCR) technologies or humans, giving new ways for insurance, financial services and pharmaceutical companies to streamline their working processes and increase productivity at lower costs.
“The consumption or normalization of data is one of the biggest business challenges facing companies across all industries. By making traditionally analog data available as digital assets, our customers are achieving dramatically improved processing times and better meeting modern customer expectations, without the time and expense of re-engineering hundreds of manual processes,” said Nowell Outlaw, CEO of Captricity.
Vidado’s full suite of intelligent document automation solutions provides customers across industries the ability to significantly move the needle toward no-human-touch processing through market-leading products, including:
- Vidado Vision (document intake, sorting, and preparation);
- Vidado Read (data digitization);
- Vidado Review (human review of any information below confidence thresholds); and
- Vidado Transform (data validation, enrichment, and delivery).
Their website offers you the opportunity to square off against their AI in terms of transcription tasks, putting together 12 different tasks in sixty seconds. It proves, of course, that artificial intelligence will soon be our masters and we its witless slaves. Or at least it proves it can perform these types of tasks remarkably quicker than we can.
“Together with SS&C, we will have a broader enterprise scope with more expertise and capacity to serve our clients, adding scale and global reach,” said Outlaw.
Regulated enterprises in the insurance, financial services, pharmaceutical and healthcare industries use Vidado technology to automate paper-to-digital data extraction to effectively go digital. This isn’t exactly like your office scanner. Your office scanner doesn’t involve recognizing characters and digital data and correlating it with an existing database to ensure veracity. That’s where the AI comes in—these bits of data are recognized, analyzed, stored and duplicated digitally. The SaaS machine learning solution enables enterprises to achieve significant cost savings and accelerate the automation of business processes. The acquisition adds 30 full-time employees in Oakland, Boulder, Colorado, and New York City.
—Joseph Morton