SinoPac Holdings Co (永豐金控) has gained patents for its artificial-intelligence (AI) image recognition technology, which could help its banking unit save at least 1,000 hours per year in examining credit documents, it said yesterday.
The company in July applied for 10 patents for its AI image recognition system and the Intellectual Property Office approved them on Thursday last week.
Bank SinoPac (永豐銀行) has connected the AI image recognition system to its core information system to identify credit documents provided by its debtors, the bank said in a statement.
Photo: Kelson Wang, Taipei Times
As many of its debtors are private power stations that sell their output to Taiwan Power Co (台電), the bank needs to examine their monthly electricity bills to check their power-generation capability and ability to repay loans, it said.
The time-consuming inspection used to be done manually, but the AI system is expected to help the bank save at least 1,000 hours a year, it added.
The bank also uses the system to help identify characters and numbers written on checks, it said.
Recognizing written characters via AI is more challenging than recognizing typed or printed characters, as everyone has a distinct handwriting and some could be illegible, SinoPac Holdings said in its patent application report.
Another challenge was recognizing numbers written in formal Chinese characters, a requirement when writing checks, it said.
“The system’s accuracy rate could be as high as 95 percent and it can identify checks in multiple formats adopted by 20 local banks,” Bank SinoPac said. “But to be cautious, we use the system to examine only about 20 percent of the checks; the remainder are still inspected manually.”
As the bank has to examine about 5 million checks in a year, using the AI image system helps boost efficiency as it can do the work of about five to six people, it said.
In Italy’s storied gold-making hubs, jewelers are reworking their designs to trim gold content as they race to blunt the effect of record prices and appeal to shoppers watching their budgets. Gold prices hit a record high on Thursday, surging near US$5,600 an ounce, more than double a year ago as geopolitical concerns and jitters over trade pushed investors toward the safe-haven asset. The rally is putting undue pressure on small artisans as they face mounting demands from customers, including international brands, to produce cheaper items, from signature pieces to wedding rings, according to interviews with four independent jewelers in Italy’s main
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has talked up the benefits of a weaker yen in a campaign speech, adopting a tone at odds with her finance ministry, which has refused to rule out any options to counter excessive foreign exchange volatility. Takaichi later softened her stance, saying she did not have a preference for the yen’s direction. “People say the weak yen is bad right now, but for export industries, it’s a major opportunity,” Takaichi said on Saturday at a rally for Liberal Democratic Party candidate Daishiro Yamagiwa in Kanagawa Prefecture ahead of a snap election on Sunday. “Whether it’s selling food or
In the wake of strong global demand for AI applications, Taiwan’s export-oriented economy accelerated with the composite index of economic indicators flashing the first “red” light in December for one year, indicating the economy is in booming mode, the National Development Council (NDC) said yesterday. Moreover, the index of leading indicators, which gauges the potential state of the economy over the next six months, also moved higher in December amid growing optimism over the outlook, the NDC said. In December, the index of economic indicators rose one point from a month earlier to 38, at the lower end of the “red” light.
RSS