3 Key Takeaways from the IAOP & ScaleHub Webinar

Verifying sensitive financial information can be such a challenge, particularly in heavily regulated industries. Since Community Brands began using ScaleHub’s crowdsourcing solution for document verification, the company has been able to offer their K-12 education customers quick and accurate financial aid application processing.

One and a half weeks ago, IAOP hosted Kendra Foss of Community Brands and ScaleHub CTO, Dan Dubiner, in a live virtual webcast: “How Community Brands cut document verification from 2 weeks to less than 2 days and saved 30% YOY”. It was a lively conversation with several great questions raised by attendees. Below we’ve summarized the three points that drew the most interest: 

3 Key Takeaways

1) Using ScaleHub’s crowdsourcing solution, Community Brands is able to give their clients document verification results in two days rather than the two weeks it used to take with employees performing the task.

Speed is critical in financial aid processing. The longer it takes a private school to respond to a family that has applied for financial aid, the more risk is introduced. Doubt festers, competing schools with faster processing methods respond and families change their minds.

For Community Brands, document verification was the process step where any promise of a speedy turnaround fell apart. Even with employees dedicated to verifying applicants’ information, it still took two weeks to verify basic information.  

Today, applicant families upload their documents directly to Community Brands’ portal, where they are automatically classified using ScaleHub’s AI-based self-learning technology. Through ScaleHub’s unique combination of artificial intelligence and crowdsourcing, Community Brands has cut document verification time from 2 weeks to less than two days. 

2) Organizations can vastly minimize risk with a solution like ScaleHub that breaks sensitive personal data into snippets before processing (as opposed to having a single person review documents in their entirety).

The documents required for a financial aid application contain all manner of sensitive personal data. Having individual employees handle document verification is not only inefficient, but also introduces unnecessary risk to the process. 

This risk can be mitigated with a technology like ScaleHub that uses AI to break the data from these documents into ‘snippets’. Crowd contributors only verify snippets, which are by their very nature detached from context and thus cannot pose any risk to data privacy. 

3) ScaleHub’s crowdsourcing solution has prepared Community Brands to quickly respond and adapt to changing market conditions related to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The amount of financial aid a family receives is based on household income, and that income is verified using tax forms that are filed annually. Because the Covid-19 pandemic changed employment for so many people so suddenly, annual tax forms will not be able to accurately capture an up-to-date income figure for most families applying for financial aid. As a result, Community Brands will need to find a different way to verify income, most likely with various other financial documents.

Most companies are unable to change a business process like this without a great deal of difficulty. But with ScaleHub, not only can Community Brands scale up or down instantaneously without bringing on additional staff, they also feel well prepared to change their processes and incorporate more forms to assess additional financial documents that reflect a family’s current financial situation.

Want more?

You can watch a recording of the IAOP webinar in its entirety, or download the slide deck from the presentation. 

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