NovaPay — is an international financial service from the NOVA group of companies (Nova Poshta), which has been creating convenient financial solutions for individuals and businesses for 14 years, operating online and offline in more than 3,600 branches across Ukraine. The NovaPay app is an innovative financial platform with separate profiles for personal and business needs. NovaPay processes millions of financial transactions daily, ensuring high speed, accessibility, and reliability of payment services for millions of customers.
REQUEST: The NovaPay team reached out to Wise IT with a request to build a solution for an automated customer verification process using artificial intelligence technologies.
RESULT: The joint team of NovaPay and Wise IT developed and tested an architecture based on Google Cloud and Gemini AI, which reduced document processing time from 1–2 minutes to 3–5 seconds with an initial recognition accuracy of 85% and ensured complete data security.
Business Challenge
As part of its digital transformation strategy and service quality improvement, NovaPay worked on optimizing the customer identification process during financial transfers or parcel collection at branches. The company was looking for a solution to transition from traditional manual document verification methods to a proactive and fully automated intelligent document processing (IDP) system.
One of the key stages of the identification process was the manual entry of passport data (booklet or ID card) and Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) by operators. The process took 1 to 2 minutes, which during peak hours could increase customer service time.
Additionally, the process was complicated by “noisy” data factors:
- Documents were often scanned or photographed at an angle, with glare from glossy surfaces or under low light conditions at the branch.
- Old-style booklet passports contained illegible handwritten text (for example, in registration stamps or the “Issued by” field).
Any typos by operators created serious legal risks. At the same time, the fintech structure had to ensure absolute confidentiality and protection of financial secrets in compliance with strict corporate standards.
Solution
The joint team of NovaPay and Wise IT developed a solution built on the Edge-to-Cloud (branch ➔ cloud) concept in a secure Google Cloud Enterprise environment. At the core of the architecture lies the synergy of two tools: the open-source OpenCV library and the Gemini multimodal model. Wise IT specialists proposed image preprocessing based on OpenCV; the NovaPay team independently integrated the Gemini model via Vertex AI for intelligent data extraction and validation.
The processing and validation process was automated in a few steps:
- Primary Processing via OpenCV: When an operator takes a quick photo or scan of a document, OpenCV automatically splits the image into separate parts and individually removes noise and glare for each single element.
- Intelligent Control with Gemini: The neural network acts as an intelligent extractor and validator, performing cross-verification of data. Thanks to optimization for Ukrainian documents, the model clearly recognizes their structure and instantly parses text fields. With its powerful contextual vision, Gemini reads even illegible handwritten text from old stamps.
- Enterprise Security: All operations take place inside an isolated NovaPay cloud environment. Customers’ personal data is encrypted, not shared with third parties, and not used by Google to train public models.
Result
Pilot testing of the AI system demonstrated a positive economic and operational effect:
- Significant Speedup (AHT): The time for entering and verifying customer data was reduced from 1–2 minutes to 3–5 seconds.
- High Accuracy: Already at the first stages of recognizing real “noisy” documents, the system achieved 85% accuracy.
- Minimization of the Human Factor (Zero Errors): The risk of entry errors in financial forms has been minimized.
- Scalability and Easy Start: The system has proven its readiness to quickly process documents on a large scale. The next stage involves expanding the project to 5,000 documents, with further scaling to a stream of 1M+ documents from thousands of branches across Ukraine.
Tech Stack
Gemini is Google’s flagship multimodal artificial intelligence model. Its uniqueness lies in its ability to simultaneously understand, combine, and analyze different types of information: text, images, audio, and code. It allows businesses to reach the level of cognitive context analysis and real-time recognition of complex handwritten fonts.
OpenCV is a leading open-source computer vision library. It is used for rapid document image preprocessing: automatic alignment, noise and glare elimination, and precise structure recognition (pages, ID cards) for further analysis.
Customer Feedback
“For NovaPay, speed of service is not just about technology, but also about customer comfort. Every day we process millions of financial transactions, so even a few dozen seconds saved during identification have a tangible effect across the entire network. That is why we are constantly looking for opportunities to automate routine processes and implement modern AI solutions.
In partnership with Wise IT, we managed to build a solution that automated document recognition and significantly reduced processing times. For customers, this means faster service, and for our teams, fewer manual operations and more time to focus on the customer. At the same time, it was of fundamental importance to us that the new solution met the highest security and personal data protection requirements. This project was another step in NovaPay’s digital transformation and the development of services that make financial services simpler, faster, and more convenient.”
– Yuriy Kasyan, Project Manager for AI Implementation, NovaPay.
