Case Study: Reserve Bank of Australia achieves fast, 100% accurate cheque-fraud detection and fund recovery with ABBYY FineReader Engine (ABBYY)

Reserve Bank of Australia Uses ABBYY FineReader Engine in Cheque Verification System

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) deployed a Cheque Verification System to detect fraudulent cheques drawn on the bank, processing about 30 million cheques annually (roughly 150–160k per month per workstation). The challenge was to reliably and quickly identify cheques with mismatched payee names among high volumes of returned items.

Using ABBYY FineReader Engine, the system OCRs the payee name from a scanned cheque image, matches it against an issuer-supplied reference database, and flags mismatches for human review. The solution delivers fast, automated fraud detection—enabling timely returns within the dishonour period—recovers thousands of dollars for the RBA and its clients, and reduces staff time needed for cheque retrieval and processing.

Reserve Bank of Australia's