AFS Drives New Functionality into Remittance Processing for Insurance Carriers; Major Insurance Carrier Inks Deal With AFS, Validating Product Strategy

    OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla.--Feb. 26, 2003--Advanced Financial Solutions, Inc. (AFS), a premier provider of image-based remittance processing solutions for insurance, retail, credit, banking, energy, transportation, and government operations, announced today that another prominent regional insurance company has selected the AFS ImageVision Remittance solution as the centerpiece of their new remittance processing technology infrastructure.
    Highly successful and established insurance companies that offer a full suite of auto, home, and life policies often have high check volumes and specialized remittance advices containing detailed claim and policy information. AFS ImageVision Remittance addresses this issue with an interface to the Kleindienst family of scanners, providing the most comprehensive and efficient document management solution available to the insurance industry. To process the large volume of checks, AFS ImageVision Remittance interfaces to high-speed transports to scan and capture coupons and checks, and Kleindienst scanners to handle odd-sized and full-sized documents, remittals, and associated checks. This powerful combination of devices keeps every related item together to retain transaction integrity. Once the payment checks are encoded, the check data is captured and transmitted. The insurance company's host system is updated to reflect receipt of payment and to trigger the activation or renewal of a policy. Check images and payment transactions can be indexed and archived for future reference by the insurance company's customer service department. Internet access to the archive ensures that payment disputes are resolved quickly.
    Another key feature of AFS ImageVision Remittance that has been attracting insurance companies is the interface to the Mitek DynaFind solution. Many of the documents and forms received by insurance companies do not follow a structured format - they fall into the category of unstructured documents. These are documents that have no pre-determined format or layout, but share common data elements. The AFS ImageVision Remittance integration with the Mitek DynaFind program makes it possible to automate data entry for a wide variety of documents and forms that insurance companies previously thought impossible to read automatically. Business-critical data is automatically found on these documents, even if the data appears in a different location on each document. The software performs a thorough analysis of the document using keywords, positional information, formatting and patterns prior to the application of optical character recognition. This enables DynaFind to accomplish a highly accurate recognition process specialized to work with a wide variety of low quality images and document types, saving thousands of man-hours for the data entry staff of insurance companies.
    The image processing technology and strategic interfaces built into AFS ImageVision Remittance are designed to carry information quickly and efficiently, answering an insurance company customer inquiry with same-day images of payment stubs and checks. This type of remittance processing functionality does more than just cut costs, it also improves customer service response time, which will also improve the bottom line.
    "We are delighted to add another large insurance company to our customer base," said Gordon Frederick, AFS Vice-President of Sales. "AFS is widely regarded as a technology innovator in image-based check and remittance processing. AFS ImageVision Remittance provides a very robust platform for paper, image, and electronic payments, with exceptional scalability, expandability, and open architecture enabling more flexible integration with new technology offerings and industry-leading technology partners. ImageVision Remittance is designed to capture information quickly, securely, and reliably and one of its most impressive and important features is the manner in which it provides our customer with a flexible and scalable solution that will accommodate their business growth and changing customer needs."

    About Advanced Financial Solutions

    AFS is a leading provider of image-based processing, payment, and transaction software technology for companies engaged in banking, retail, energy, insurance, transportation, credit, and government operations. An international company with offices around the world, AFS software programs and applications process checks and items for nearly 13% of the world's financial institutions. One of the nation's fastest growing private companies for four consecutive years according to Inc. Magazine, AFS provides payment-processing solutions that improve productivity, flexibility, efficiencies, and service levels. Gary Nelson, President and CEO of AFS, was selected as the Southwest Area's Ernst & Young Technology Entrepreneur Of The Year in 2001. Visit AFS on the Web at www.afsimage.com