Introducing: statement scanning from ClearStake

We’re delighted to announce the general availability of the ClearStake statement scanner. In the simplest possible terms, we enable organisations to make decisions dependent on a detailed understanding of a customer’s finances in seconds, even when all you have to hand is a PDF statement.

The ClearStake statement scanner:

• Converts the data contained within any bank statement into structured, readable data - with 100% accuracy
• Checks to ensure the statement is a genuine, unedited original document
• Categorises every transaction in the statement, both incomings and outgoings
• Shows a report summarising the financial health of the individual concerned, which is customisable to your own decision-making process
• Provides a ‘smart statement’ enabling individual transactions to be found and tagged quickly and easily
• All within a comprehensive case management system

If you are an organisation that spends any time at all looking through bank statements, this is the product for you. By using ClearStake, you save time and money, eliminate the risk of human error, and you reduce customer churn by getting to decisions faster.

Conventional statement scanning technology exports to Excel or csv, leaving you with plenty of work to do before getting to a decision. ClearStake, on the other hand, turns raw financial data into intelligence, and does the calculations you need to perform automatically. For example, we detect and report:

• Salary (and any changes in salary over time)
• Disposable income
• Large and unusual transactions
• Common ‘red flags’ such as short-term loans, gambling activity, and indeed anything you want to look for.

In other words, we get the data into a format you can use, and then do all the work for you. We get you to a decision fast. 

So if you would like to stop staring at statements with a biro and calculator in hand, and get back to growing your business, get in touch. We can help.

How we ended up here

One of the founding principles of ClearStake is that we are not selling a technology, but solving a problem. And that problem, in case it isn’t obvious by now, is enhanced due diligence (EDD): the time and money it costs, and the customers you never see again after you have asked them for financial data.

At the outset, we saw the potential for Open Banking to make this process a lot simpler. We still do, and it remains at the core of our mission.

But the feedback we got from the organisations we worked with was unanimous: “people still send us statements, and we need a way to process those quickly too”. Not really a surprise - although Open Banking is definitely happening, there are still plenty of people who prefer old-fashioned paper (or PDF, to be strictly accurate).

And with that in mind, we added the ability for customers to upload statements when completing EDD checks, as an alternative to connecting via Open Banking. 

But that wasn’t the whole story. It became apparent that for all sort of reasons it wasn’t always practical to expect customers to share statements online. One common use case is the desire in retail casinos to collect financial documents within the context of a personal relationship. In that instance, could we support gambling operators uploading the documents themselves?

With the release of our statement scanner, the answer to that question is “yes”.

And we quickly realised that the potential users of this product extend far beyond our core market of gambling operators. From property rental to good old-fashioned accountancy, an awful lot of people spend an awful lot of time looking at bank statements, and we can help. 

Partly because this is a product to be used by everyone, we specifically designed the product to be used with zero integration. All you need is a login and a computer. No setup, and a super-intuitive UI that makes getting started a piece of cake.

So as we said above, if you’ve been spending too long looking at bank statements - let’s talk!

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