Aston Chace Group

Creating an innovative competitive edge for this financial advisory firm with intelligent automation.

Aston Chace, a Sydney-based boutique advisory and restructuring firm, supports businesses as they tackle complex commercial issues. Data analysis is a core function of their organisation which is required to evaluate the current position of clients and to develop sound advice.

The problem? Bank statements most often come in PDF form and varying layouts depending on the bank and type of account, and these layouts tend to change over time. As such, there isn’t an off-the-shelf solution to extract the data and support analysis of bank transactions. Current standard practice across industries that require this analysis (for example insolvency and forensics) is to do the analysis manually or send the task offshore. This takes time and is open to potential errors or omissions, so extra time is spent by senior resources to check the quality of the manual extracts.

"As market-leading pdf extraction tools couldn’t do the job, we partnered to create a solution for this problem."

The resulting solution takes three seconds per page to extract and classify the data accurately, which means we can onboard new clients more efficiently and spend more time with them, rather than in the data analysis. 

Creating an automated solution to give Aston Chace more time

We worked with Managed Functions to deploy this virtual worker which can extract and tag transactions on bank statements with appropriate keywords and categories and help analysts quickly assess clients’ financial positions.

The solution combines machine learning and traditional OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technologies to quickly extract data from pdf statements (including poor-quality scans) from Australian banks.

The impact of our RPA solution

There are three ongoing benefits Aston Chace have experienced after partnering with The Missing Link for automation.

Speed and accuracy

“Our data extraction solution is faster and more accurate than the human version of the process could possibly be. It’s been a game-changer for us,” explains Ian Niccol, Principal at Aston Chace Group.

Competitive edge

“We can now analyse the data and provide answers much faster than most in the industry. This has improved customer experience and turnaround times significantly,” remarks Ian.

Security

Keeping the process onshore keeps the security of the documents and the extracted data within Aston Chace’s control.

The value of Automation for Aston Chace?

The team was stunned by the results when The Missing Link switched on their new Automation solution. 

"It’s hard to quantify the total impact of our new bot beyond the time it saves for our team and improves speed to deliver accurate analysis for our clients. This gives us more capacity to take on a greater number of new cases."

"Our team is enjoying not having to do the painful task of bank statement data extraction now that it’s been automated."

– Ian Niccol | Principal at Aston Chace Group.

“It’s been an enormously useful solution for us and we’re grateful to have had a trusted partner guiding us through the entire process – we couldn’t recommend The Missing Link enough.”

Reach out to The Missing Link today to engage automation experts committed to building greater efficiencies for your organisation, like our industry-leading work with Aston Chace.