A Framework for Understanding Unstructured Financial Documents Using RPA and Multimodal Approach

The financial business process worldwide suffers from huge dependencies upon labor and written documents, thus making it tedious and time-consuming. In order to solve this problem, traditional robotic process automation (RPA) has recently been developed into a hyper-automation solution by combining computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) methods. These solutions are capable of image analysis, such as key information extraction and document classification. However, they could improve on text-rich document images and require much training data for processing multilingual documents. This study proposes a multimodal approach-based intelligent document processing framework that combines a pre-trained deep learning model with traditional RPA used in banks to automate business processes from real-world financial document images. The proposed framework can perform classification and key information extraction on a small amount of training data and analyze multilingual documents. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, extensive experiments were conducted using Korean financial document images. The experimental results show the superiority of the multimodal approach for understanding financial documents and demonstrate that adequate labeling can improve performance by up to about 15%.