Flow Software, a Kiwi integration software vendor, has provided a key part of a data collection, collation and analysis solution built by Australia’s Umlaut Solutions to improve the compliance posture of financial institutions.
Founded in 2003, Flow Software provides integration software solutions for a range of clients and partners that are undertaking and supporting digital transformation efforts.
Umlaut Solutions, based in Sydney, was engaged by the National Australia Bank (NAB) to find a solution to the problem of proving that they were providing services for the fees that they were charging.
While this sounds like a simple concept, the reality was that it required a large amount of customer data to be kept consistent across an enterprise financial organisation and the companies that provided services on the bank’s behalf.
Umlaut was already working on this issue for NAB when a Royal Commission found that it was a problem across the banking industry and, as a result, put new rules into place to keep it in check.
NAB recognised that the solution Umlaut had built could ensure compliance with these new rules and so scaled up the engagement.
In order to solve the problem, the solution needed to be able to collect data coming from over 500 sources, be able to collate that data correctly, and then analyse it to ensure that work was being done correctly. To date, it has processed around 100 million documents.
“We knew that that market had a problem because it was all in the media – I think it was really good timing that Royal Commission occurred. Everything that we did was a ‘nice to have’ and then all of a sudden it became a ‘need to have’,” explained Umlaut co-founder and director Shane Reid.
Umlaut chose Australian company FileBound Solutions to deliver automated document management with US-based PSIcapture for OCR, and sewed the solution together with Flow Software’s Statelake integration platform to ensure that the data would travel cleanly between all of the applications involved.
“We took those three products, knowing that there's support behind it for the full integration of those three talking,” Reid said. “It allowed us to be able to deliver very quickly and, to be fair, commercially it was a good outcome compared to some other products in the market. We went down a Dell Boomi path … even the managed service cost behind that and professional service cost behind that to get it up and running would have pushed the project right out.”
Flow Software CEO David Masters also highlighted the platform’s scalability, “from simple, low volume processing to these types of complex, high volume integrations with multiple sources of data.”
After seeing their success with NAB, the Umlaut team realised that the solution was now primed to solve what was now a major compliance issue.
Reid said that they have now created smaller versions of the solutions that can clean up any mess and then can be left with clients so that they can continue to stay compliant without having to pour hours into manual administrative tasks.
“Using these tools, this integration long-term, not just as a one-off project, means that they can interact with the systems day-to-day better to make sure that data is being validated correctly and, from a compliance perspective, we've got exception handling. The likes of Flow (Software) allows those systems to talk day-to-day, enabling us to interact with different data sets, to then display reporting to the client,” Reid explained.
The company is now ready to take the solution into new industries that are documentation and process heavy, such as logistics and aged care.
“We're not trying to build the sexy stuff, with the new front ends and all the portals and stuff,” Reid said. “It's how much can we do in the back end, the boring stuff, to remove as much data entry and become a little bit more human-centred again.
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