How The Master Trust Bank of Japan reduced manual workload by 75% with Rossum

In the financial services industry, it’s hard to underestimate the importance of strict compliance with laws and regulations to ensure a relationship of trust and reliability with clients. The Master Trust Bank of Japan (MTBJ), a subsidiary of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, is one of the largest banking institutions in Japan. MTBJ partnered with Rossum to streamline its fund accounting operations and reduce the overall risk exposure. This partnership supports the bank’s long-term vision to promote highly transparent management to preserve the trust and confidence of its clients and the general public.

The Challenge

The Master Trust Bank of Japan (MTBJ) takes the role of a trustee to perform fund accounting management operations on behalf of its clients. The client mix is diverse and includes numerous overseas asset and fund account managers. As a result, the account statements issued by the client can vary significantly in layout and format, having to meet a variety of local jurisdiction requirements, which makes it difficult for conventional OCR solutions to capture the data on them.

To address this challenge, MTBJ assigned a total of 40 staff members across three divisions to manually enter relevant values and information from each account statement for further processing. Additionally, further language limitations led to the bulk of the workload concentrating in the hands of a few staff members.

The Solution

MTBJ set out to implement a machine learning OCR solution to streamline the work and reduce the manual processing burden.

Approximately 15 solutions from the US, UK, Canada, and Japan were trialed in the process, with Rossum ultimately chosen for its simplicity, superior AI, and ability to handle a multitude of different document types and functions.

“With Rossum, we see impact early on: from reducing overhead costs to increasing the speed of commercial transactions and significantly reducing the risk of exposure. The solution has a positive influence on both internal users and our clients”

Ryo Kawaguchi, Manager at Master Trust Bank of Japan

Rossum deployed its dedicated AI engine to train an extraction model to streamline and automate the processing of the account statements.

With the support from Rossum’s customer success and global services teams, MTBJ’s project team was able to select an optimal training method. The team saw an additional benefit in Rossum’s user-friendly interface, enabling the extraction model training to be carried out solely by end-users who had no previous expertise in data science or programming.

The Impact

For MTBJ’s project team, Rossum was able to provide immediate value by freeing up valuable human resources.

Smooth transition into a new automated process enabled MTBJ to preserve and consolidate the business lines of each operation, which, despite the period of adaptation and staff turnover, resulted in a more stabilized quality of output.

Following Rossum’s deployment, approximately 75% of the workload has been reduced. Rossum substituted the initial extraction process performed by multiple staff members with just one human operator, who validated automatically captured data in a matter of seconds. This improved overall productivity and decreased the burden on individual staff members. Transitioning out of the paper-heavy operations also allowed higher workplace flexibility for MTBJ staff, who were able to work from home amid the Covid-19 lockdown period. Additionally, the elimination of manual data entry helped to significantly reduce the error rate and ensure the reliability of the final results.

The Vision

The MTBJ’s vision is to always strive to provide services of the highest quality. To achieve that, the bank is continuously working to improve the quality and efficiency of its operations through a variety of initiatives, including the use of advanced technology.