Pernambucanas: Enhances AI-powered fraud detection using its own solution Documentoscopia
About Pernambucanas
Pernambucanas is a retailer operating in +340 cities in 15 states and the Federal District with over 500 stores and ~12,000 employees. Besides retail activities, Pernambucanas owns Pefisa, a fintech company focused on developing and managing several financial products.
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Contact usGoogle Cloud's OCR technology helped the company automate processes in Documentoscopia, a solution developed in-house.
Google Cloud results
- Three documents analyzed every two seconds
- 80% reduction in specialized manual document analysis to identify fraud
- Quality boost in data collection through image analysis and processing
- Field data extraction and processing in +30 document types
Processing over 10K documents daily
Founded 115 years ago, Pernambucanas is a Brazilian retailer offering its customers a wide range of products. With around 12,000 employees and over 500 stores, it operates in +340 Brazilian cities in 15 states and the Federal District.
But the company is not only a standout in the retail market. Its fintech company, Pefisa, is responsible for developing and managing financial products, including cards, personal loans, insurance policies, and digital accounts. With around 13 million customers and significant operations, the company offers a diverse service portfolio for both individuals and entities, including Banking as a Service (BaaS) features for brands in various segments.
In 2020, Pernambucanas saw the need to incorporate solutions to support an important factor of store-based customer service: interpreting data and identifying forged or falsified documents.
With the goal of preventing fraud and reducing costs associated with manual analysis, the company's Digital Lab built and deployed a tool called "Documentoscopia," to validate documents of individuals interested in becoming Pernambucanas's customers.
Previously, these validations were 100% manual, which involved long processing times. In addition, the large volume of requests received led to overburdened employees. Therefore, with the aim of improving work processes, data recognition, and scalability levels, Pefisa began to search for other cloud-based alternatives.
Consequently, using its Digital Lab, the company decided to deploy artificial intelligence tools to streamline document processing. Throughout, as one of its IT partners, Google Cloud provided support so that the team could streamline resources and make them more available.
"To offer the best customer experience, we needed to focus on the cost and quality of solutions. We already had experience using Google Cloud for a few years, precisely because we trusted the IT quality of its tools. However, in 2020, our in-house Digital Lab began the work of integrating Pefisa's applications with the platform supported by this technology."
—Fabiano Rustice, CIO, PernambucanasUnified resources and OCR technology bring new horizons
Throughout this transformation process, conducted entirely by Pernambucanas itself, Google Cloud's team helped the company adopt solutions gradually with the support of courses, webinars, and virtual meetings. The main technical challenges related to platform usage were solved in a responsive fashion across team interactions.
Supporting the large volume of both online and in-store customers in Pernambucanas required the company to develop IT models featuring high stability, low response times, and efficiency. And these could all be fulfilled by the new infrastructure.
Digital Lab also leveraged Vision AI to structure Documentoscopia. This tool supported the integration of Google Cloud's optical character recognition (OCR) resources with the company's own applications to recognize and extract digital texts from printed or scanned documents.
Therefore, automated document processing and recognition resources developed by Digital Lab are used as a basis to deploy fraud detection models.
Streamlined customer admission and faster response times
Documentoscopia operates on a 24/7 basis and it is 100% cloud-based. This solution analyzes the ID cards and driver's licenses of potential customers interested in opening a Pernambucanas Digital Account or obtaining other of the retailer's products.
Before implementing the solution built by Digital Lab, the company needed professionals available 24/7, but efficiency was almost impossible for a single human operator to achieve. Thanks to Documentoscopia, the time required for analysis was reduced from a few days to an average of just eight seconds.
Today the company can process a daily average of +10K documents: that is, three documents analyzed every two seconds. Documentoscopia's technology has led to faster response times, high resource availability, and operating stability.
So far, the OCR solution has been used to process over 14 million elements, including 300K document images per month; it takes one second to process each image, on average. The team managed to reduce the specialized manual efforts required to identify document-based fraud by 80%.
The company also improved the quality of data collected through the analysis and processing of pictures, enabled by Documentoscopia with the support of Vision AI's technology. As a result, the retailer significantly lowered the average time needed to accept new customers: from hours to up to 10 seconds, which encourages more customers to join.
"Thanks to Documentoscopia, developed by Pernambucanas's Digital Lab, we can provide a solution to fight fraud and lower costs while protecting customer experience. Supported by Vision AI, we have reduced operating efforts and increased efficiency when verifying and preventing fraudulent transactions."
—Fabiano Rustice, CIO, PernambucanasThinking about the future, the company has started to test Vision AI's face recognition features to improve accuracy when analyzing IDs. The team is also willing to further explore the capabilities of Vertex AI integrated with OCR technology to deal with higher document volumes and accelerate service delivery.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Pernambucanas
Pernambucanas is a retailer operating in +340 cities in 15 states and the Federal District with over 500 stores and ~12,000 employees. Besides retail activities, Pernambucanas owns Pefisa, a fintech company focused on developing and managing several financial products.