Founded in 1999, Iflytek Co., Ltd. is a well-known intelligent voice and artificial intelligence listed enterprise in the Asia-Pacific region. Since its establishment, it has been engaged in the research of core technologies such as intelligent speech, natural language understanding and computer vision, and has maintained the international cutting-edge technology level; Actively promote the landing of artificial intelligence products and industrial applications, and strive to make machines "listen, speak, understand and think" and build a better world with artificial intelligence. In 2008, the company was listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (stock code: 002230). As a technological innovation enterprise, Iflytek adheres to the core technological innovation, and has made great achievements in various international evaluations such as speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, graphic recognition, image understanding, reading comprehension and machine reasoning. He won the National Science and Technology Progress Award twice and the China Information Industry Independent Innovation Honor "Information Industry Major Technological Invention Award", and was appointed as the leader unit of the Chinese phonetic interaction technical standard working group, taking the lead in formulating Chinese phonetic technical standards. Iflytek adheres to the development strategy of "platform+track". Based on the core technology with independent intellectual property rights, in 2010, Iflytek released the open platform of artificial intelligence with intelligent voice and human-computer interaction as its core-Xunfei Open Platform, which provided one-stop artificial intelligence solutions for developers.
I. Brief introduction of the case
Employee reimbursement scenario is one of the common scenarios in enterprise management. In the traditional reimbursement mode, from the perspective of employees, it is inefficient to post tickets one by one, and it is time-consuming and laborious to fill in documents manually; From the financial point of view, it is not only required that the tickets are consistent with the facts, but also that the bills and processes conform to the provisions of the company management system. Therefore, employees and finance pay a lot of compliance costs because of inefficient manual work; When auditing and compliance monitoring, it is a very heavy task to access paper materials, and it is difficult to find bills, and it is difficult to access them and then file them.
Based on these business pain points, we thought about how to liberate productivity with the help of Xunfei AI technology. In 2020, we developed a reimbursement robot system, which mainly relied on OCR technology for intelligent bill filling, NLP technology for intelligent audit of rule engine, and intelligent receipt box integrating software and hardware, etc., realizing the automatic processing of manual operation and the automatic identification of compliance risks by machines, which not only saved time for employees and finance, but also improved the total factor productivity for enterprises.
According to statistics, there are about 20 million accounting practitioners in China, half of whom are engaged in repetitive work such as checking invoices, reimbursement and payment. If the reimbursement robot can be widely used, it is expected that more than 5 million grassroots accounting practitioners can be released from these heavy and boring routine jobs and engaged in jobs that require social insight, negotiation and creative thinking.
Second, the transformation work
(1) Strategic planning
In the past 10 years in Iflytek, the investment of enterprises in IT has greatly optimized the management process and improved the operational efficiency, especially in the fields of budget, statements, funds, taxation, sharing and management accounting, which has greatly improved the informatization level of financial management and brought earth-shaking changes to the concept and mode of financial management, all of which are important foundations for building intelligent finance. In the field of intelligent finance, by combining artificial intelligence technology with IT system and using natural language for human-computer interaction, we plan to build reimbursement robots, accounting robots and financial robots to realize human-computer collaboration and human-computer coupling.
The reimbursement robot, 2020-2021, with the help of perceptual intelligence technology, standardized business processes, established a standard system, and strengthened the man-machine interaction mode, achieved overall solutions such as intelligent reporting, intelligent approval, intelligent auditing, intelligent question and answer, automatic payment, and mechanism vouchers, and drove the creation of the work value goal of finally realizing less people and no one.
The accounting robot, 2022-2024, is mainly used in the financial accounting scene. By using cognitive intelligence technology, the robot can establish the accounting processing model in specific scenes based on the accounting process and professional knowledge in various accounting fields, and carry out a lot of data learning simulation training, so that it can have the professional level of intermediate accountants, and finally achieve the ability to handle overall accounts based on the understanding of accounting standards and various financial management systems of the company, thus reducing the labor intensity of middle-level accounting practitioners in the company.
Financial robot, 2024-2025, is mainly used in the management accounting scene, using cognitive intelligence technology, hoping to realize the planning, control, analysis and prediction of enterprise management through the understanding of management science, and assist CFO, COO and CEO of enterprises to make management decisions. We know that compared with financial accounting, management accounting emphasizes the internal management of the unit and improves the economic efficiency service, which belongs to internal service accounting; By analyzing the past, controlling the present and planning the future, we pay more attention to the creation of future value. Therefore, exploring and planning the layout of financial robots in advance is believed to provide strong auxiliary support in strategic management and business decision-making of enterprises in the future.
(2) Business model
Enterprise digital employees are the important strategic direction of enterprise digitalization in the future, mainly concentrated in labor-intensive fields, such as manpower, insurance, finance, banking, manufacturing, etc., and the market generally agrees that the financial digital employees are the most widely used fields, accounting for 20%. If we continue to analyze their subdivision applications, the cost audit ranks third. Therefore, we can improve the competitiveness of expense audit through the reimbursement robot, and at the same time expand the scenarios of reconciliation, tax declaration, invoicing, etc., to create an overall solution for financial digital employees, improve the process efficiency and service quality of basic financial work of enterprises, and establish the foundation for digital and intelligent transformation of enterprises.
According to the consulting report of iiMedia Researc, the service market of China’s fiscal and taxation enterprises will reach 243.71 billion yuan in 2020, and it is estimated that the transaction scale will reach 266.44 billion yuan in 2021, and it will keep a high growth rate. In recent years, the number of main enterprises in the national market has continued to grow, providing a continuous source of customers for the enterprise service market in the fiscal and taxation field. Among them, in the reimbursement and expense control industry, with the increasing trend of financial electronization, the market of expense control and reimbursement industry in China has achieved leap-forward growth in recent years. By 2020, the revenue scale of the industry market is as high as 1.12 billion yuan.
(3) Technical architecture
Iflytek’s digital transformation path of intelligent finance is "AI+IT", which is also the solution of "platform+track" strategy in the financial field of Xunfei. It combines voice technology, natural language processing and image recognition technology with financial management, and builds a platform layer with engines such as processes and rules as the mainstay, and an operation layer with task management and image management as the mainstay, to empower and support core business application layers such as employee reimbursement, expense control, business travel and claim. This involves several key technologies:
(1) The bill OCR recognition model is based on years of accumulation of Xunfei in the field of image recognition technology and deep learning, which improves the invoice classification accuracy to over 95% and the word accuracy to over 98%.
(2) The contract element extraction model is based on the NLP training platform accumulated by Xunfei in the field of industry cognition for many years. Aiming at the special optimization and innovation of financial payment scenarios, the accuracy of contract key element extraction has reached 92%.
(3) Based on the OCR technology, the intelligent reporting assistant automatically substitutes and calculates the reimbursement expenses and document fields, which can help employees to complete the reporting and submission of reimbursement conveniently and smoothly.
(4) Based on the extraction of contract elements and the self-developed rule engine, the intelligent document review assistant automatically matches the review scenarios, checks business compliance and highlights business risks and violation risks according to the preset company review rules.
Third, the transformation effect
(1) Enterprise value
At present, the reimbursement robot has covered all employees of 140+ companies in Iflytek. The business scope covers loan (application, change), reimbursement (personal, corporate, travel, expenses and materials), pre-made invoices, unplanned payments, financial sharing (accounts receivable, credit, performance, physical objects, images, audit), expense sharing, claim for payment, and related transactions. It has supported the business scale of 35,000+documents per month, 5,000+payment claims and 1,000+loan documents. The time for employees to fill in the report was shortened from 15 minutes to 5 minutes, the error rate of financial review was reduced from 11.64% to 3.8% per month, and the efficiency of financial review was improved by 52%. The annual cost savings based on the total efficiency improvement of filling, reviewing and claiming are about 10.44 million.
In addition, we also plan intelligent voice reimbursement, and answer policy consultation and system questions in the reimbursement process through customer service robots, so as to enhance the interactive experience of the reimbursement person, which is expected to reduce the workload of consulting posts by 70%; A more efficient intelligent document review assistant is planned to provide configurable document review ability, reimbursement data portrait, data visualization and so on for the approval of business side and financial side.
(2) Social value
1. Online invoicing reduces tax-related risks.
Cancel the manual entry method of the original invoice and use OCR to collect, check the duplicate and verify the authenticity of the invoice, which not only improves the efficiency of invoice collection and use, but also improves the compliance of payment and tax; Unified input tax invoice entry port ensures the integrity and standardization of business input data, and facilitates the management and statistical analysis of invoice data.
2. Electronic tickets are free of printing, providing demonstration effect.
Promote free printing of electronic invoices, and promote the comprehensive and universal use of electronic invoices in the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain; Promote the formation of a green and low-carbon development mode, reduce taxpayers’ operating costs and save social resources; Promote the modernization of national governance capacity and enterprise management, facilitate consumers to save and use invoices, and create a healthy and fair tax environment.
Fourth, the pain points, difficulties and suggestions
Financial digital transformation is not a project with a beginning and an end, but a process of continuous change, during which it will face many challenges of pain points, difficulties and blocking points:
1. Lack of high-level digital strategy
The competition in the digital age requires leaders to maintain a highly sensitive insight into digital technology and emerging business models, and to constantly reflect on or adjust the company’s strategy. If they blindly follow the trend of transformation, they will only increase the high risk of failure.
2. Lack of professional digital transformation talents
Talents suitable for digital transformation should know both business and technology, and both are indispensable, especially digital transformation leaders, who need enterprises to reserve talents in advance.
3. Lack of digital transformation organization mechanism
In the digital transformation, organizational mechanisms such as cultural shaping, agile R&D, innovation and fault tolerance are very important. Business innovation will inevitably increase the cost of trial and error, and you can’t judge immediately because you have done something wrong or failed to achieve the expected results, especially at first. Don’t exert excessive performance pressure; As long as it is customer-centered and adheres to the bottom line of compliance, it should be encouraged at the policy level.
Source | China Association of Listed Companies
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