Suncorp has invested $1.5 million in an information capture system that is being piloted in its loans origination operations. The pilot digitises loan application forms and supporting documents, and then captures data from those forms to decide whether or not to grant a loan. It's expected the application will go live within six weeks.The Kofax platform, selected over alternatives from EMC and IBM, can capture, classify, separate and extract data from scanned forms or documents, validate the information and then send it to other computer applications. Dawn Stephenson, executive manager of enterprise applications at Suncorp, said that in the past loans origination was entirely manual, with up to 5,000 paper files under management.She said that Kofax captured data and had been set up to immediately flag any "showstoppers", such as a missing signature, so this could be quickly remedied and not hold up the process.  The captured data is then routed to Suncorp's FileNet content management system where it can be accessed by loans officers.The institution has taken a very cautious approach during the pilot - sending any documents which are not crystal clear to an exception queue for human verification - leading to Suncorp currently facing a 50 per cent error rate. However, over the next six weeks this is expected to drop as Kofax's in-built machine learning kicks in to improve automatic capture rates."The intention is that this will ultimately be used across Suncorp," Stephenson said, although she acknowledged that it was a hard sell into some business units, which had to be convinced of the benefits of moving to a more paperless process.She said that as part of the pilot Suncorp will measure how much faster a loan can be granted.Although data capture may seem a little prosaic, it promises competitive opportunities according to Stephenson, who said: "This allows us to turn around information a lot more quickly, so we don't lose out to other banks."  Besides offering speedier turnaround of applications, there are staffing implications, as "you don't need all your mailroom staff" to manage the distribution of incoming documents, she said.Stephenson said, as a result of savings, Suncorp expected to achieve a return on its $1.5 million investment within two-and-a-half years.