The Seal Imprint Verification System: Cases of Introduction in Financial Institutions

At a time of drastic change in the environment surrounding financial institutions, administrative work centralization aimed at reducing the workload of the back office has propelled the introduction of cost-effective image processing systems geared toward centralized operations. Further, in an effort to prevent forgery, more and more institutions have done away with duplicate seals and are introducing seal referencing systems which use a digitized image of the customer’s registered seal. Nevertheless, in business systems related to operations which require seal imprint verification, such as bill management and the receipt of fund transfer requests, seal imprint verification has remained outside the scope of systemization. In the past, seal imprints were verified by visually comparing the customer’s registered seal displayed on a special seal referencing machine with the seal imprinted on the actual form, or by sending the actual form to a branch office and visually comparing the seal with the customer’s registered seal in a signature book. Our seal imprint verification system is designed to streamline the mountain of seal imprint verification work represented by the bills, checks and fund transfer requests handled at a financial institution’s central operations department. Introduction of our system makes it possible to extract the seal imprints from both the form image data acquired by the institution’s business system and the customer registered seal image data registered in the seal referencing system and compare the two using image processing, thereby enabling institutions to complete the seal imprint verification work accumulated in the central operations department.