Supercharging Merchant Cash Advances with Ocrolus

When you’re offering Merchant Cash Advances (MCAs), timing and accuracy mean everything. The moment a small business needs capital, the expectation is that they can get it quickly—often within hours or a few short days. Yet behind the scenes, underwriters are swimming in a sea of financial documents: bank statements, tax returns, credit card statements, you name it. Manually going through these documents can be a painstaking process, filled with potential for human error and slow turnaround times.

Enter Ocrolus, a cutting-edge document automation platform that leverages AI-driven data extraction to streamline the underwriting process. By automating data capture from paper and digital documents, Ocrolus helps lenders make fast, data-backed decisions. Even better, Ocrolus offers a robust API that integrates seamlessly with LendSaaS, enabling lenders to run a smooth, end-to-end Merchant Cash Advance operation under one digital roof.

In this blog post, we’ll explore what Ocrolus does, why it’s such a big deal for MCAs, and how the Ocrolus-LendSaaS synergy can elevate your entire funding process. Finally, we’ll wrap up with a call to action for a free demo of LendSaaS so you can see firsthand how these integrations make life easier for MCA providers.

1. What Is Ocrolus?

Ocrolus is a document automation platform designed to take the hassle out of manual data entry. It does this by combining Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology with machine learning models to accurately capture data from financial documents—think bank statements, pay stubs, or invoices. Unlike basic OCR tools, Ocrolus is built specifically for financial services, so it’s calibrated to pick up the nuances of transactions, balances, and statement layouts from various banks.

High Accuracy: Ocrolus touts near-perfect data accuracy by blending AI algorithms with human quality control.
Versatility: Supports a wide range of documents and formats—paper scans, PDFs, digital bank feeds, and more.
Fraud Detection: Ocrolus can flag potential tampering or anomalies, adding an extra layer of security.
API-First Design: This is crucial for hooking into other platforms like LendSaaS, allowing you to automate your entire pipeline rather than juggling multiple systems.

Essentially, Ocrolus frees up your underwriters from tedious data entry so they can focus on analyzing the data rather than manually collecting it.

2. The Data Challenge in Merchant Cash Advances

If you’re running an MCA operation, you know that speed is the name of the game. A merchant who needs quick capital isn’t willing to wait weeks for an approval decision. MCAs usually rely on daily or weekly repayment schedules (pegged to the merchant’s future sales), which means you need an intimate understanding of a merchant’s cash flow and overall financial health. Here’s where the challenges pop up:

Varied Document Formats: Bank statements from different institutions come with different layouts.
Potential for Fraud: Merchants sometimes modify PDFs or provide partial data.
Time-Consuming Manual Entry: Underwriters spend hours transcribing figures or verifying transaction histories.
Risk of Human Error: A single misplaced decimal could skew your entire risk assessment.

Ocrolus tackles these exact pain points. By reading and standardizing financial data, it lessens the chance of errors and speeds up your underwriting cycle. When integrated with a platform like LendSaaS, it ensures that everything from application intake to final approval runs smoothly.

3. Key Features of Ocrolus for MCA Providers

3.1 Automated Data Capture

Ocrolus automatically identifies key pieces of data in a bank statement—like deposit amounts, date ranges, average daily balances—and lifts them into a structured format. This drastically cuts down on the time your team spends extracting these figures.

3.2 Intelligent Categorization

With advanced machine learning, Ocrolus can categorize transactions. For MCAs, you might look for patterns in revenue deposits, operational expenses, or other transactions that give clues to the merchant’s ability to make daily or weekly payments.

3.3 Fraud Analytics

Ocrolus also employs techniques to flag potential tampering, such as mismatched fonts, altered deposit amounts, or missing pages. For MCA providers dealing with high volumes of applications, these automated checks can be a lifesaver.

3.4 Custom Rules

Each lender might have unique criteria—like minimum monthly deposit thresholds, certain account health indicators, or maximum overdraft days allowed. Ocrolus can be configured to highlight or flag these parameters for your review.

4. Why Ocrolus Matters for Merchant Cash Advances

MCAs hinge on real-time decisions. If you can’t process a merchant’s application within a day or two, your competitor likely will. Ocrolus helps you:

Accelerate Approvals: By automating data extraction, your underwriting team gains valuable hours—or even days—per application.
Boost Accuracy: Machine learning plus human-in-the-loop verification means fewer mistakes, letting you trust the numbers you see.
Scale Without Breaking: As your MCA portfolio grows, so do the inbound documents. Ocrolus scales with you, saving you from hiring an army of data-entry staff.
Improve Risk Assessment: Quick, comprehensive data analysis leads to better underwriting decisions. You’re not making guesswork calls based on partial or outdated info.

In short, Ocrolus is a powerful tool that merges seamlessly with your broader tech stack—particularly if you’re running your MCA operations on LendSaaS.

5. Introducing LendSaaS: Your MCA Control Center

If you’re not already familiar with LendSaaS, it’s a comprehensive lending platform designed to handle everything from application intake to final payoff. Specifically tailored for alternative lenders, LendSaaS covers:

Customizable Underwriting Flows: Build your own rule sets and triggers for when to request additional documents, automatically decline applications, or set up a manual review.
Application Management: Let merchants apply online, track statuses in real-time, and request updates all in one place.
Automated Payment Management: Schedule daily or weekly ACH pulls, track repayment progress, and set alerts for missed payments.
Analytics & Reporting: Keep a finger on the pulse of your portfolio’s health, spot trends, and generate compliance-friendly reports without jumping between multiple systems.

And, of course, LendSaaS is built with an API-first philosophy, making it easy to plug in best-of-breed solutions like Ocrolus.

6. How the Ocrolus-LendSaaS Integration Works

From a high-level perspective, here’s how the synergy between Ocrolus and LendSaaS might look in your MCA workflow:

Merchant Application
A merchant submits their application through your LendSaaS portal, uploading relevant financial documents (bank statements, possibly other statements like credit card processing reports).
Automatic Document Routing
LendSaaS recognizes the file types and sends them via API to Ocrolus for data extraction and analysis.
Data Extraction & Validation
Ocrolus processes the documents, running them through OCR and machine learning checks, then outputs a structured dataset (like an itemized list of transactions, deposit frequency, average daily balance, etc.).
Underwriting Integration
The data is fed back into LendSaaS, where your underwriting rules take over. If the merchant’s average monthly deposits exceed your threshold, the system might auto-approve. If there’s a high overdraft frequency, it might auto-decline or queue the application for manual review.
Results & Next Steps
LendSaaS notifies the underwriting team (or the merchant) about the decision. If approved, LendSaaS automates the daily or weekly ACH pulls, referencing the same data points for ongoing monitoring.
Ongoing Monitoring (Optional)
Should you wish to track the merchant’s financial health post-funding, you can request updated statements monthly. Ocrolus can re-process them, and LendSaaS can alert you if red flags appear.

Throughout this process, you maintain complete visibility into each stage, enabling you to catch any unusual patterns and ensure a frictionless merchant experience.

7. Tech Guy’s Take: The API Magic

For those of you who love to geek out on integration specifics, the Ocrolus-LendSaaS relationship is a textbook example of how APIs are transforming finance:

RESTful Endpoints: LendSaaS queries Ocrolus with a secure token, sending document files or data references. Ocrolus returns structured JSON or XML responses containing extracted data.
Webhook Notifications: Once Ocrolus finishes processing, it can ping LendSaaS with a webhook, letting it know that data is ready. This event-driven architecture speeds up underwriting.
Data Mapping: LendSaaS uses pre-configured data mappings to place the extracted info—like transaction line items or monthly deposit totals—into the correct fields, so your underwriting rules can run automatically.
Scalability: Both Ocrolus and LendSaaS run on cloud-based environments, ensuring you can handle increasing volumes of applications without clunky hardware upgrades.

This cohesive ecosystem means less time wrangling files and more time focusing on strategic decisions—like optimizing your MCA product or exploring new markets.

8. Real-World Impact: Speed, Accuracy, and Profitability

Let’s put it all together in a hypothetical scenario:

Challenge: You’re an MCA provider dealing with 500 new applications a month. Your underwriters are swamped, and mistakes keep happening in data entry.
Solution: You roll out LendSaaS to manage the entire application and funding workflow. You also integrate Ocrolus to handle the ingestion and analysis of bank statements.
Result:
- Time Savings: Underwriters no longer manually enter transaction data. This speeds up approvals by an average of 48 hours.
- Lower Error Rates: The machine learning approach flags potential document tampering, saving you from funding high-risk or fraudulent merchants.
- Better Conversion Rates: Merchants love the quick turnaround, so your brand reputation climbs, and you see an uptick in referrals.

When you multiply these effects across dozens or hundreds of monthly applications, the ROI quickly becomes apparent.

Conclusion: Ready to Accelerate Your MCA Workflow?

There’s no question that data accuracy and speed are mission-critical in the Merchant Cash Advance space. Ocrolus offers the automated document processing muscle to handle massive volumes of financial statements, while LendSaaS ties it all together with a seamless lending platform that orchestrates underwriting, funding, and repayment in real time.

If you’ve been feeling the pressure of growing application volumes, or if you’re simply looking to streamline your underwriting pipeline, the Ocrolus-LendSaaS integration is a powerful lever. You’ll be able to process MCAs faster, reduce risk through accurate data, and scale your operations without piling on manual tasks.

Ready to see Ocrolus in action within LendSaaS?
Click the link below to schedule a free demo of LendSaaS, and we’ll walk you through exactly how this integration can turbocharge your Merchant Cash Advance process. We look forward to helping you revolutionize your MCA workflow with a true AI-driven approach to data and automation!

Schedule a free demo!