MIRAMAR, Fla. — Like any other big credit union, Eastern Financial Florida Credit Union found itself pushing a lot of paper.

But the $2 billion CU said it has made the job of organizing and storing that information in a useful form easier by using a little Brainware.

That's the name of the firm that has supplied the CU with IDC-distiller, an intelligent data and capture solution that captures scanned and other stored data and organizes it without requiring templates, exact definitions, taxonomies, or indexing.

At EFFCU, that included items ranging from member signature cards to check images to simple loan documents and Web transaction summaries to massive mortgage files.

“Our senior management determined that we needed to give our members instant access to their account information, no matter what credit union location they were requesting services from,” said Dee Raber, the credit union's assistant vice president of document management.

To do that, “we had to address the inefficiencies in a paper-based operation,” Raber said. “That meant automating the classification and indexing of documents so that content from the previous day — even 600-page mortgage folders — would be available the next day.”

EFFCU turned to a new company with deep technology roots in the credit union and banking world to address that need.

Based in Herndon, Va., Brainware uses information-sorting technology developed originally in Germany. The tools gained wide use in the banking world under a series of ownerships, including SER Solutions, Macrosoft, and DMS, adding other services along the way.

Parts of the business were sold off, including DMS to Jack Henry & Associates, and Brainware Inc. was formed to market data capture and enterprise search solutions to a client base that now includes credit unions, small banks, and global conglomerates.

For instance, the company's software is used to process more than two million invoices a year from 550,000 suppliers to Halliburton's shared service centers in the United States and Dubai. And the IRS uses it to extract data from more than 300 fields in tax returns.

“At the engine level, our technology is designed to primarily do three things: search, classify and extract,” said Charles Kaplan, Brainware's vice president of marketing.

“Because it works on content rather than keywords or index values, it's very good at looking at text and text patterns and associating them with what you want to search for,” he said. “That makes it ideal for unstructured documents and for use at financial institutions.

“Credit unions and banks don't have a lot of control over what a lot of the documents they use look like, where the information is on those documents and what form it's in. That's where traditional OCR and other scanning technologies break down.”

The system also learns with use, recognizing data chosen by the user for storage in standardized form as they pop up each day in disparate forms. The need to explicitly define templates, anchors, zones, and specific keywords is eliminated.

“IDC-distiller learns context around the data you need,” Kaplan said. “We also train the application much like you would a human operator, for instance, telling it what things are needed to be pulled off a mortgage file.”

Unstructured information typically represents more than 85% of an organization's data and employees spend up to 10 hours a week just looking for information they need to do their jobs, Brainware said.

“We're able to help alleviate the burden,” Kaplan said.

At EFFCU, the IDC-distiller system allows Raber's team to handle more than 30,000 pages a day in a wide variety of documents.

“Before, we were never caught up,” she said. “Today, documents are available to our member service representatives across our entire branch network by the next day of service.”

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