Passport to success: How Expatrio uses Passport Data capture to make relocation easier and faster

Nanonets client Tay Kim is the Product Operations Manager of Expatrio Global Services GmbH, an end to end relocation platform for expatriates and international students who want to move to Germany. The complete digital solution, approved by the German Federal Foreign Office, sets its customers up with the German visa essentials of a blocked account and in getting health insurance - both conveniently secured while in their home country.

The company minimizes the exposure to paper-pushing bureaucracy & redtape, to make moving countries simple. But, the company itself needed a solution to eliminate/minimize inefficiencies in its internal processes. Enter: Nanonets.

As part of its end-to-end service, Expatrio performs pre-verification services for the passports of its users.

Although automated border controls are becoming more commonplace in many countries such as the US, the reality is that passports generally tend to equal paper. And paper? That still usually means manual processes, which are often completely inefficient.

The traditional process of manually keying information typically involves multiple employees - some manually entering relevant data into the data entry software, and then several reviewers verifying the entry with the document, before the document data is accepted. The team was looking to replace this traditional approach with a more efficient one to - mitigate costs and deliver high quality data as quickly as possible.

The traditional process was expensive and time consuming. Not only that, but once you take larger volumes of work into account, scaling this became difficult as the only way to do this was with more employees, and they had to be trained for the work on the job.

Thankfully, all stages of the old process were exactly the sort of tasks which Nanonets automation can totally transform.

Additionally, often ID documents do not fit to one uniform template or layout, making global verification more complicated and a challenge for rule-based solutions. The photographs used in the documents were mostly of low quality, not aligned and not adhering to standards. This makes creating an internal OCR solution extremely difficult, expensive, and likely, not as accurate. NanoNets provided a proven, high-quality solution which streamlined the process and that could be relied on to secure customers' data privacy, as well as being able to handle a wide variety of different international formats.

The goal for NanoNets was therefore to automate this passport verification process, and use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to read & verify the machine-printed text on the passport documents, rather than have a person manually comb through each one.

Reimagining this process and embracing automation could save time and money, freeing up the company’s agents to work on other areas of the business and get more done, as well as eliminating the errors occurring in the process, improving the overall quality of these procedures and making the entire business more efficient.

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• NanoNets’ solution uses OCR technology to read the customer’s passport.
  
• This is done by scanning the passport by the user.
  
• The data is extracted.

Extracting data from every individual passport manually was a hugely time consuming process when done by human agents - and also left plenty of room for human error.

NanoNets technology could be applied to Passport verification incredibly well: Nanonets can capture as many fields of data as you wish, and present this in any way you require. Applying this to the data extracted from the passport documents, NanoNet’s OCR solution meant that now, all the same data could be extracted and presented automatically, with a success rate of 95% per field.

In real terms, this results in a reduction of manual work from the human agents of around the same 95% per field - saving the company huge amounts of time and money.

NanoNets was also perfectly suited to the ID verification needs of the business, due to its ability to correct the orientation of images, as well as working with both images and PDFs. In fact, NanoNet’s end-to-end data extraction technology has been used by clients to process more than 10,000 ID documents a month in more than 120 different languages.

This OCR technology by Nanonets has also been used in a number of industries in which it is crucial to confirm someone’s identity, such as in financial services, travel and telecoms. And not just for verifying large datasets, but for spotting counterfeit passports and for matching the passport photo in the document to an image taken on a smartphone, tablet or webcam, for example.

By using Nanonets AI rather than verifying data manually, organizations have also been able to vastly reduce the risk of human bias in these judgments of confirmation.

What was different about NanoNets?

Originally, Expatrio came to NanoNets because it had the exact OCR artificial intelligence expertise the company was looking for, with no extra frills or charges. Or, as Kim puts it, “nothing overly done or anything provided which would normally cause unnecessary costs.”
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With NanoNets, we can apply our technology and expertise to help you overcome your exact business challenges - and that’s exactly what Expatrio received when they implemented our OCR technology into their passport verification process.  

The other element that made NanoNets stand out from the crowd? An extremely high level of service and expertise about the project.

• Easy to use and flexible UI
• Learns & retrains continuously
• Seamless automated workflows with any tool or software
• Requires almost no post-processing
• Handles common data constraints with ease
• Works with multiple languages
• Requires no in-house team of developers

While manual passport verification can be far more expensive in the long-term than investing in automation, Expatrio were also sold on Nanonets’ affordable costs.