In this edition of our readers’ favorite #ThingsCustomersSay series, we are featuring Hyperscience client CI Financial. Based in Toronto, Ontario, CI Financial is a global asset and wealth management company. We spoke with Martin Cheung, Director of Innovation & Digital Transformation, about how the firm is leveraging technology to streamline account opening, what it’s like to partner with the Hyperscience team, and CI’s plans for the future.
Before Hyperscience
Before implementing Hyperscience, our account opening process was completely manual. We receive a lot of paper at CI Financial through mail, email, and Fax – the entire industry does. Manual processing puts a strain on our operations and challenges our ability to scale our business. Intelligent Automation can help solve this issue. First, we needed a solution to digitize and extract data from the volumes of paper we were processing, and Hyperscience solved that problem in our automation journey.
Discovering Hyperscience
CI Financial was first introduced to Hyperscience through a discovery engagement with a top-tier consultant. This technology was very new to CI, and we were quite impressed with the automation possibilities with this type of platform approach. CI Financial, together with our implementation partner, evaluated Hyperscience against a well-known competitor. The out-of-the-box accuracy on handwritten and typewritten transcription was incredible and simplified our selection process.
Once we selected the technology, our implementation partner worked with our Infrastructure team to build the environments for Hyperscience. The documentation from Hyperscience and the support we received during and post-implementation were fantastic. The Hyperscience Customer Experience team worked with us every step of the way to adjust our settings and ensure our Machine Learning and accuracy models are optimized.
Hyperscience is a critical component of our intelligent automation lifecycle. Without Hyperscience, our process would be fractured and partially manual.
Quantifiable Results
At the start of the implementation, CI Financial’s Transcription Automation rate was 91% now, only 10 months later, that rate has skyrocketed to upwards of 98% with 99% accuracy as the machine continues to learn on our data.
Additionally, CI Financial has seen a steady increase in the percentage of documents handled by automation – from only 17% of our document volume in January before using the Hyperscience Platform to over 60% in October. Q1 to Q3 this year we experienced a 142% increase in the number of documents routed to the automation, and we’ve seen a 253% increase in documents processed through the automation queue.
On the Larger CI Financial Organizational Response
Our expectations were quite high for Hyperscience, and the tech is being well-received across the enterprise.
Hyperscience has been very proactive and helpful in every aspect of implementation and support of this technology, as well as helping to socialize the benefits and explore new areas of opportunity within our enterprise. Since launching the initial account opening use case, we’ve also deployed Hyperscience to process address changes and other service requests, Tax-Free Savings Accounts (TFSAa), and Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs).
We have regularly scheduled meetings with our Customer Success Manager, in addition to calls on product enhancements and executive-level discussions on product and feature roadmaps to gain our feedback and ensure alignment. The team at Hyperscience has been very responsive to ensure our success, not only with the software utilization but with the long-term role Hyperscience plays in our automation journey. We are true partners in this People, Process, Technology paradigm.
On What’s Next
The technology itself is impressive – just five years ago this level of intelligent automation would not have been possible. Our confidence in the technology is growing, and we’re planning to expand our intelligent automation efforts into several other areas of our business, including Finance and Accounting, Corporate Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Compliance, Fund Accounting, Sales, and more. Our Automation Center of Excellence (CoE) has started to have discussions with departments outside of our current workstreams and is showcasing Hyperscience and the automation we have achieved together during company town halls to socialize the art of the possible. The potential is endless, and we have several exciting years ahead of us!
