Ephesoft Continues its Expansion Across The Asia Pacific Region
From the perspective of managing the Asia Pacific and Japan region for Ephesoft – from Sydney, Australia – it’s an exciting time in this part of the world. A report on the regional economic outlook for this region “remains robust – the strongest in the world, in fact – and recent data point to a pickup in momentum.” At Ephesoft, we are seeing this first-hand.
Expansion is taking form both internally and externally. The team has grown from one to nine employees in less than a year, while expanding office locations from Sydney to most recently Singapore, Malaysia and New Zealand. Stephen Lee, Sales Director in SE Asia joined Ephesoft in December, and is already proving to be a great asset for this region as the team continues to grow. All our new employees have previously worked for competitive, document capture solutions and were attracted to Ephesoft by our modern, innovative approach to customers, partners and technology.
Ephesoft’s Asia Support Center is up and running with a team of three with a combined knowledge bank of over 30 years, led by Christopher Chang. The Support Center speaks multiple languages and will help support the region’s rapid growth. Additionally, our newly created global training department hosted its first training class in Kuala Lumpur. New partners and resellers have also joined Ephesoft’s partner program to help service and implement their many customers.
Not only is bringing knowledgeable partners and employees onboard important, but the company’s commitment to customer success has proven itself as working very well. In the spirit of team effort, the largest bank in South-East Asia became a customer, utilising Ephesoft’s platform for financial and trade documents. Another auto financing customer in New Zealand has already seen 400% growth in productivity and 92% accuracy in processing thousands of documents monthly. Similarly, the largest affordable housing provider in Western Australia, operating in land development, housing construction and property management, was able to accurately automate and classify over 6 million of documents, eliminating unnecessary manual data entry and capitalising on cost savings.
“The value of an idea lies in the using of it,” stated Thomas A. Edison. This quote expresses my excitement as the forces of true partnership with customers, employees, resellers and the global community work together to make document-related business processes better, fast and less expensive.
The Customer Journey from First Meeting to Happy Customer in 3 Weeks
Auto Vehicle Financing Company MTF Strikes Gold with Ephesoft Transact
It was the 9th of May and received a notification that I had a new lead in our CRM system. CIO Ashley Ross from MTF (Motor Trade Finance), had spoken to the Ephesoft team at the Finovate conference in California and was interested in taking a closer look at the Ephesoft’s Transact advanced document capture platform.
MTF, is a leading provider of auto vehicle financing for clients in New Zealand and has been providing financing for almost 50 years. They process over 4,000 multi-page loans each month, which generates a high document volume.
I contacted Ashley who explained that his team had been trying unsuccessfully for 18 months to get IBM’s Datacap capture platform running properly. After a more thorough discovery process, MTF shared their critical business requirements and gave Ephesoft a sample set of MTF’s documents to determine if we could move forward. A couple of days later, Cliff Skoglund (my awesome solution engineer guy) and I demonstrated how we had trained Transact to classify a range of MTF’s documents, including loans forms, bank statements, drivers’ licenses and other types, and extracted key fields from these documents.
MTF’s reaction was pure gold, advising us that the system showed more capability in our one hour demonstration than they had been able to achieve with IBM Datacap over the previous 18 months. Two days later, we were asked to perform a further demonstration to MTF’s CEO, Glenn Todd. To challenge us further, MTF provided us with a further set of documents to ingest and classify real-time, and once again we met their demands in a live environment.
Ephesoft introduced Platinum Partner, Future State Systems (FSS), to the client and conducted a detailed requirements’ gathering process and MTF signed a contract to become the first Ephesoft customer in New Zealand. FSS, an integration specialist, understood MTF’s previous pain with a long, drawn-out implementation that was costly and still not complete. Instead, FSS delivered a compelling value proposition to win the deal: fixed price delivery with a clear end date for go-live, which was very attractive to MTF.
From our first contact with MTF to the contract award was under three weeks! The technology platform and team sold itself! FSS set up a requirements’ gathering workshop with MTF to begin implementation. They applied Ephesoft’s patented machine learning technology to classify about 50 unique document types, extraction of metadata from the documents, integration with database applications to database look-ups, active directory and their enterprise content management system. The entire project took 6 weeks to complete, which is already 92.3% shorter customer onboarding compared to their first attempt with IBM.
MTF is still reviewing the many business benefits of transitioning from Datacap to Transact, but the signs are already encouraging with an approximate 400% performance in throughput of applications. I’m pleased to report we have a very satisfied customer who is pleased to act as a reference for us, is helping us to build a case study and willing to support us in marketing activities including webinars and seminars.
