Chase Manhattan Mortgage

Chase Manhattan Mortgage has helped millions of Americans realize the dream of home ownership. The company is one of the largest mortgage originators and servicers and is a key component of JP Morgan Chase, the nation’s third-largest bank. Chase Manhattan Mortgage manages thousands of paper documents each day. Charged with the task of updating the company’s document management system, Rick Duff, Chase Manhattan Mortgage’s manager of software development and imaging, deployed a technology solution to meet the company’s growing content management requirements. With the help of Kofax, Chase now scans more than 2.5 million documents per month, a significant order of magnitude over the legacy technology capability that limited processing to 750,000 documents.

The Challenge

Chase Manhattan Mortgage developed Quest, its first document management system in-house in 1992 using a variety of applications. These included applications custom developed in the C and Visual Basic programming environments, the Informix database application and Plexus’ optical/storage management product for storing and retrieving multimedia data objects. In 1999 the company added ImageFIRST Office, Plexus’ integrated software solution providing document image processing (DIP), computer output to laser disk (COLD), production and ad hoc workflow, and document management technologies. The systems supported the company’s loan default divisions and converted customer financial documents into images, enabling customer service representatives to immediately access customer account information.

“The prior solution used ICR for automated indexing, but its lack of image cleanup features led to error rates of almost 50 percent, which required costly manual intervention. Skewed documents were the biggest issue,” Duff said. “Our bar codes were also obscuring important information. It was obvious that changes had to be made because we were scanning 100,000 new mortgage documents per day and growing fast.”

The Solution

Chase Manhattan Mortgage chose Kofax Ascent Capture software and Adrenaline scanner controller boards for its next-generation system. Ascent Capture offered faster, more accurate document deskew and a wide range of other image enhancement options. Its production-oriented architecture, user interface and proven stability made it well suited for Chase’s large and rapidly growing operation.

The Adrenaline scanner controllers provided reliable high-speed scanning and additional image enhancement features, plus fast, accurate bar code recognition. They worked so well that Duff changed his automated indexing method from hand-print recognition to Adrenaline bar code recognition. The enhancements dropped the manual correction rate nearly 50 percent to less than 1 percent.

Kofax solutions also gave Chase the flexibility to meet its future needs without forfeiting its initial investment. For example, Ascent Capture enables users to index, validate and release to back-end systems not only scanned paper, but also electronic documents, Web forms and other digital data streams, such as XML.

Chase also is taking advantage of Ascent Capture’s new electronic data capture and optional polling capabilities. The company has begun to capture mainframe print streams using Ascent’s Import Controller, converting them to image (TIF) files, and then employing OCR to index values from the images. Ascent Capture permits Chase to run the same workflow process used on scanned paper-based documents. No additional applications or programming are required.

The Bottom Line

“The cost improvements are significant. Chase has lowered the company’s software and hardware expenses and reduced scanning charges from 10 cents to 6 cents per page,” Duff said. “The company also reduced its staffing requirements due to the system’s ease of use. Chase Manhattan Mortgage staff can now prep documents for scanning more quickly and spend less time on manual indexing. As a result, Chase has been able to scan 40 percent more documents using the same equipment.

“With the help of Kofax, Chase is well on its way to reaching its goal of becoming a completely paperless environment.”