Ahead of FinovateSpring: Mobile vision is transforming data collection and improving UX

After successful pitches three years in a row, we are coming back to FinovateSpring 2017 to showcase a new product from our machine vision technology portfolio.

Back in 2013, Microblink was called PhotoPay and our main focus was to eliminate the abundance of manual data entry from mobile apps, particularly when it came to typing in payment data on a small mobile keyboard. PhotoPay was introduced as the fastest way to pay bills – a simple solution for scanning payment slips in order to capture data.

Nowadays, PhotoPay is the most popular product for the mobile banking industry. More than 40 European banks have implemented PhotoPay into their apps and provided customers with a more user-friendly banking experience where manual data entry is replaced by a camera. Our Erste Bank case study showed that the number of mobile banking users increased by 160%, and the number of transactions increased by 100% in only 3 years after PhotoPay launch. Recently, a bank in Serbia won an acknowledgment for their mobile banking app in large part due to the PhotoPay feature.

What else is new?

Besides developing PhotoPay, we have been focused on improving our proprietary machine vision and are continuously making enhancements to real-time text recognition (OCR) for mobile devices. We have introduced new products: BlinkID (ID card scanner), BlinkInput (various data scanner). All products are developed in the form of SDKs (software development kits), all with the same goal: to improve user experience by eliminating manual data entry.

Over 300 customers worldwide are now using our technology for various purposes. In the airline industry, it’s used for scanning boarding passes and identity documents, in hospitality it’s used for both mobile and front-desk check-in, telcos use it for SIM registration and TOP UP, automotive for scanning VIN and license plates, healthcare for medical cards, and financial institutions for scanning standardized payment slips or free-form documents.

Since our Finovate debut, we have also developed a mobile app called Photomath to showcase how the immense potential of machine vision technology. The app scans and solves mathematical problems in real-time by using a smartphone camera. Last year, Photomath made a large leap forward and became the world’s first app that can recognize handwritten math problems. Something that started as a showcase is now a separate company transforming the way children learn math. It’s among the top educational apps for both iOS and Android with over 70M downloads and over 8M active monthly users.

Over the last 18 months, our R&D efforts have been focused on taking upgrading our machine learning approach to OCR (DeepOCR). In San Jose we will be showcasing the latest and the greatest from our mobile vision technology portfolio.

At Finovate, we will debut BlinkReceipt, a real-time mobile vision SDK that extracts every possible detail from consumer purchase receipts across the retail industry. The SDK runs locally on-device (no server-side processing), has high accuracy, scales infinitely, and is the most cost-effective way to collect consumer purchase data. BlinkReceipt can be used for purchase validation, loyalty and reward programs, market research, and personal finance/lifestyle management, amongst other things. Currently, it supports receipt scanning for over 80% of US printed receipts. Our plan is to increase the US coverage to as close as 100% and expand internationally in the future.

We’re excited to be part of Finovate again this year and we hope to see you there!