FOCA: A System for Classification, Digitalization and Information Retrieval of Trial Balance Documents

Credit risk evaluation and sales target optimization are core businesses for financial institutions. Financial documents like t-balances, balance sheets, income statements are the most important inputs for both of these core businesses. T-balance is a semi-structured financial document which is constructed periodically by accountants and contains detailed accounting transactions. FOCA is an end to end system which first classifies financial documents in order to recognize t-balances, then digitalizes them into a tree-structured form and finally extracts valuable information such as bank names, human-company distinction, deposit type and liability term from free format text fields of t-balances. The information extracted is also enriched by matching human and company names who are in a relationship with existing customers of the bank from the customer database. Pattern recognition, natural language processing, and information retrieval techniques are utilized for these capabilities. FOCA supports both decision/operational processes of corporate/commercial/SME sales and financial analysis departments in order to empower new customer engagement, cross-sell and up-sell to the existing customers and ease financial analysis operations by digitalizing t-balances.