Ocrolus vs Photon Commerce: Which is best?
Heron doesn't offer financial document parsing but around 50% of our customers integrate a third party to allow their customers to upload PDFs if they don't want to connect via an account aggregator like Plaid. While account aggregation is typically the best option, some customers just aren't comfortable connecting their bank account or bank with institutions that aren't covered by their selected account aggregator.
Here we'll be comparing Ocrolus against Photon Commerce. Ocrolus is best for bank statement PDF parsing, while Photon Commerce is stronger for invoice parsing. Here are the key differences.
The pros of Ocrolus are:
- Most established OCR vendor for financial services in the US
- Great accuracy: 99%+
However there are some drawbacks:
- Human-in-the-loop model leads to high latency
- More expensive than most other options
- Customers report issues with integrations
And the benefits of Photon Commerce are:
- Very fast
- High accuracy
- Great on receipts
But again there are some drawbacks:
- more focused on invoices than bank statements
The right tool for parsing transactions from bank statements will really depend on your requirements. If latency isn't critical for your business, Ocrolus is currently the market leader but if you need realtime parsing, Inscribe and Photon both offer this.
Inscribe is widely considered the leader in fraud detection but other providers offer this too. Unlike account aggregation, you can likely integrate a single PDF parsing tool rather than multiple ones.
Our suggestion is to run a test with a set of 20-30 PDFs provided by your customers and select the partner that performs best after weighing up price, latency, accuracy, and other value-add features.
We specialize in normalizing and deriving insights from raw transaction data pulled from any provider. So if you would like tailored recommendations of what provider to choose, book a demo.