Random question - statement 'scanning' but not scanning?!

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6 Jan 2008
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Hi,
Know I'm meant to be revising right now, but my mind wondered on to a random question:

In companies such as EDF - when customers pay funds to them, by bank transfer, and they are asked to provide a reference to go with the funds; How does (and what do they use software/hardware) to read and confirm the references and amount been paid by each customer and tie it to their database?

I know they must have some sort of advanced scanner which sends data and checks against a database. But did they just get something custom built for them or is there a package software to do this?

The reason why i ask is because there must be loads of companies that use this, and someone must have come up with a package to do it, instead of customising for each company?
 
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is widely used for this sort of thing as well as barcodes which may also be read by OCR or scanned. You see things like "do not write in this area" printed on some letters which is scanned by OCR. There are probably several companies offering solutions for this and they might offer a standard template but I doubt it would be hard to customise for specific needs.
 
Do you know any of the companies names? I really interested in the way this technology works all together.

Thanks
 
By bank transfer I assume you mean internet banking etc in which case nothing gets printed out so there's no scanning involved, the company gets a feed of payment info which goes straight into the accounting system electronically.
 
By bank transfer I assume you mean internet banking etc in which case nothing gets printed out so there's no scanning involved, the company gets a feed of payment info which goes straight into the accounting system electronically.

Ok - so is that provided by the banks then, or again is that some kind of software on the company end?
 
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