ABBYY Q&A: Bringing Intelligence to Document Processing

ABBYY is an artificial intelligence-powered document processing tools provider that was formed in Soviet Russia in 1989 and relocated to the US nine years later. Data Management Insight caught up with chief executive Ulf Persson to find out more about the company and its plans.

Data Management Insight: Hello Ulf, how was ABBYY begun and what is its guiding mission?

Ulf Persson: ABBYY started with a straightforward ambition: to make the information inside documents accessible and usable. That principle has guided us for decades. As organisations grew more data-dependent and the complexity of documents and their operations increased, it became clear that simple recognition was no longer enough. We responded by evolving our capabilities in a disciplined, purposeful way.

DMI: Please explain how ABBYY is helping financial institutions solve their data challenges?

UP: ABBYY helps financial institutions tackle their data challenges right from the start. KYC begins the moment a customer engages with a bank – opening an account or submitting documents. The key is spotting risk early, before it becomes a bigger problem. ABBYY Document AI looks at those documents automatically, checking them against KYC rules and flagging suspicious patterns immediately.

Process AI gives banks full visibility into how people and information move through their workflows. It spots weak points, recurring patterns and hidden risks that might otherwise go unnoticed, while making continuous compliance monitoring much easier.

ABBYY combines advanced document understanding with fraud detection to identify tampering, altered content, or inconsistencies – ensuring documents are authentic and compliant, without slowing down operations.

Whether it’s onboarding new customers, processing loans or insurance claims, or managing payments, ABBYY helps financial institutions detect fraud proactively, speed up response times and keep their operations secure and efficient.

DMI: What role do you see intelligent document processing (IDP) playing in data management over the next five years?

UP: IDP has a critical role in the day-to-day operations of many financial services organisations today. It is needed for automating the document processing to onboard new clients, KYC, loan origination, trade finance and credit applications. Within the next few years, its role will only grow as organisations experiment with LLMs and realise the risk, cost and performance capability shortfalls. We recommend a hybrid approach by extending GenAI with purpose-built AI that is tailored to transform and extract specific business documents, ensuring accuracy, privacy, and governance.

IDP will continue to enable organisations to unlock predictive insights, drive deeper system integrations, streamline operations and deliver better customer experiences – all while maintaining governance and control over their data.

DMI: What are some of the biggest new challenges enterprises face in turning unstructured documents into reliable data, and how is ABBYY helping overcome them?

UP: There’s a new generation of tech and business leaders realising how hard it is to automate document processing. While generative AI opens exciting new opportunities, its effectiveness depends on multiple factors, the most obvious one being data quality.

But it is more than that; the enterprise user must weigh other considerations such as cost, reliability and explainability, compliance with internal and external rules and regulations, technology documentation, maintenance, to name a few.

Ultimately, financial services organisations should focus on their core competency. From a plug-and-play cloud solution to SDKs, we make it easy for leaders to quickly elevate their document processing to achieve intelligent automation.

DMI: How do you harness AI to service clients?

UP: Our focus is to build AI that understands and processes documents and business-related data. We also recognise that IDP is only one component in the broader enterprise automation landscape. Financial services organisations connect document processing with ERP systems, RPA platforms, data warehouses, compliance frameworks, business applications, and increasingly also with agentic systems and orchestration layers that coordinate AI-driven workflows. Integrating Document AI to all these systems is core to our strategy.

Harnessing AI to service clients ultimately requires a different mindset. You are not implementing a tool. You are reshaping how decisions are made, how work is structured, and how value is distributed.

DMI: How important is it that clients can tailor their use of IDP?

UP: Every organisation has unique document needs across sectors and even individual businesses. The versatility of ABBYY’s purpose-built AI means documents and data of any language, format and complexity can be utilised in intelligent automation solutions. The ability for a customer to tailor their use of IDP is a signature capability. Companies typically start with one or two use cases and then scale these and add new use cases without having to go back to the drawing board. The ability to tailor IDP for diverse use cases is crucial. ABBYY’s versatile solutions enable organisations to optimise processes, enhance efficiency, and improve customer experiences across industries.

DMI: What does ABBYY see as the key data needs of financial institutions in the next five years?

UP: We expect continued heavy investments to modernise and simplify customer-facing and back-end processes within financial institutions. AI-powered IDP is a key enabler here.

Two other investment trends are fraud detection and AI compliance. In a world of digital transactions, document fraud is and will continue to be a formidable threat. With digital fraud becoming more sophisticated, strained traditional compliance approaches and compliance failures in KYC workflows can result in costly sanctions. With 68% of FCA anti-money laundering (AML) fines linked to poor data quality, manual reviews and legacy systems are creating inefficiencies and unnecessary risk.

DMI: What are ABBYY’s development plans for 2026?

UP: ABBYY’s strategy for the coming years remains focused in three key areas. First, continuous innovation. We want to keep exceeding expectations with our AI models’ performance and how they integrate with other technologies to deliver the data accuracy and precision customers can trust. This also includes reimagining how we can more quickly bring our solutions to market and making it easier for customers to deploy within their business processes at scale across their organisation.

Second, proactive advocacy for governance and compliance guardrails. Enterprise automation must operate with full traceability, accountability, and control. We have been leading in this area since 2019 by adhering to the latest standards and contributing to the creation of an AI auditability certification with ForHumanity.

And third, pragmatic delivery focused on outcomes, not hype. We will deliver AI-powered IDP that performs where it matters most, inside real business processes.