Patent-pending technology enables AppZen to capture 10 times the amount of expense fraud caught by existing solutions
September 27, 2016 (Sunnyvale, Calif.) — AppZen, the first artificial intelligence (AI) solution for back-office automation, today announced the launch of ReceiptIQ, the company’s patent-pending computer vision technology, which enhances its AI-driven automated expense report auditing solution to deliver the deepest and most accurate auditing capabilities on the market.
“Expense reports typically include attached documentation and require finance teams to validate them to ensure only legitimate and compliant expenses are reimbursed,” said Anant Kale, CEO of AppZen. “It’s a manual process that requires a lot of resources and leaves companies susceptible to expense fraud and compliance issues. With the launch of ReceiptIQ, we’re able to use artificial intelligence to read through and understand every item on a receipt, and other documents like emails and hotel folios, just like a human auditor would do. For the first time, finance departments can have total protection against expense fraud and compliance issues.”
ReceiptIQ combines state-of-the-art computer vision, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP) and semantic technologies to replicate the human process of extracting information from paper and digital documentation. Because it can interpret and understand all the information included in the documentation, not just amounts, dates and merchant names, ReceiptIQ is able to validate the legitimacy of the spend and compliance of expenses to policy and regulatory requirements. Unlike other expense report auditing solutions, ReceiptIQ is able to understand the context of expenses by cross-checking information in real time against thousands of external and social sources to determine if they are accurate.
“Take a hotel folio or business lunch for example,” Kale explains. “With ReceiptIQ, AppZen is able to read through and perform a semantic analysis of every line item on the receipt. This means that when we look for alcohol, we can detect thousands of brands of liquor, cocktails and the various methods of describing mini bar charges — making the analysis extremely effective. If the company’s policy prohibits alcohol purchases, ReceiptIQ will invalidate the reimbursement and flag a compliance issue in real time. This same technology is also used for things like capturing unauthorized upgrades in airlines, hotels and car rentals, as well as out-of-policy claims for hotel laundry and cell phone charges.”
Kale added, “This level of analysis has never been done anywhere else, and our customers are seeing significant savings in hard T&E costs over their prior auditing tools and processes. In addition, they’re able to achieve their target of 100 percent audit, something not previously affordable nor feasible with current tools.”
According to a random analysis of 1,700 unique expense reports, which was conducted by AppZen and represented more than $3.6 million in expenses, AppZen’s software is able to capture 10 times the amount of fraud of existing solutions and double what could be captured previously with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology.
Over the past several months, AppZen has rapidly expanded in the automated back-office space. Since announcing its $2.9 million seed funding round led by Resolute Ventures in late June, AppZen has forged partnerships with Concur®, the leading provider of spend management solutions and services, and NetSuite, a leading integrated cloud business software suite.
For more information about AppZen, visit: www.appzen.com.
About AppZen
AppZen, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is the first artificial intelligence (AI) solution for back-office automation. The company, which graduated from 500 startups and raised $2.9 million in funding, including from Resolute Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Silicon Valley Bank, MasterCard and FundersClub, uses patent-pending natural language processing machine learning algorithms to analyze data and automate back-office functions. AppZen’s enterprise-level automated expense reporting and auditing product reviews expense report data, cross-checks it with external sources and social media in real time and detects compliance issues and fraud – a half trillion dollar issue in the U.S. The company works with a number of enterprises, including Hitachi, SunRun and Cantor Fitzgerald and has partnered with technology companies, including Oracle and Concur. For more information about AppZen, visit www.appzen.com.
