OCR for bank transfer

Hi,
I still get most of my private bills via “paper”, with a totally cryptic reference code in the subject line.

Every time, I have to hack this individual reference code into my online banking by hand - which is annoying and error-prone.

I wish for an app to take a photo of the reference slip, ocr it, read out the usual informations for account number etc. and transfer them into the fields of my web banking page in the phone’s browser.

Those informations are so maximally standardized that it should be easy to program the ocr part; easier even than on a business card reader app.
Don’t know if it’s any problem to create the link and entries to the respective banking web page.

If you like it, please comment! Regards, T.

Sounds like a good idea - if it’s feasible. The OCR part would be easy, as you say. But from what I’ve seen, different banks have very different formats & location of the reference number. I can’t imagine an easy way to automatically detect which field goes where.

Perhaps you could be better of just making a universal OCR app, which automatically copies the scanned text to your computer’s clipboard? That would be really handy, and for more than just bills.

Hi David,
thanks for your response and opionion! Interesting input if the banking formats are really very diverse. I guess there will be a relatively small number of usual terms though, so that the app could make a suggestion and ask the user to verify - or allow him to drag/drop the items to their appropriate places. Would be ok, too.

I’m not sure about the universal OCR app, and they already exist, don’t they?

Do you have a suggestion how to take this idea to the next step and find people who want to develop or further expand and access?

BR, TS