Ripcord Selected to Digitize Document Lifecycle for Coca-Cola Bottlers' Sales & Services on the Back of Significant International Expansion with Japanese Mega Bank

Hayward, California — November 7, 2019 — Ripcord, the first robotic digitization company dedicated to creating a truly paperless world, today announced an agreement with Coca-Cola Bottlers' Sales and Services, as well as new global sales wins with MUFG of Japan, new updates to its flagship SaaS software Canopy product, and a new company website to reflect its brand focus of delivering engaging digital experiences. 

The announcements confirm that enterprises globally need integrated digitization solutions to achieve digital transformation. In a recent survey, conducted at ARMA InfoCon 2019, 93 percent of content management professionals believe extracting smart data from paper records revolutionizes the value of that data for the business, with 70 percent saying the way to achieve this is with digitized records - something exemplified in the use cases Ripcord is announcing today.

Enterprise Customers

Coca-Cola Bottlers' Sales and Services (CCBSS)

Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Sales and Services (CCBSS) has selected Ripcord to digitize the document lifecycle in North America. Ripcord will work with CCBSS to automate document capture of key fulfillment and logistics records using robotics and AI, enabling further robotics process automation and digital transformation for the organization. Ripcord will be responsible for digitizing millions of proof of delivery documents per year. 

According to The Hackett Group research, procurement organizations can achieve a cost reduction of 45 percent or higher with a complete digital transformation. “The technology Ripcord is delivering will help drive increased operational efficiencies, support our efforts to provide exceptional customer service, add innovative value, and contribute to financial risk mitigation for our bottling partners,” said Suzana Keller, Chief Procurement Officer at CCBSS.

MUFG Bank

MUFG Bank, the largest bank in Japan, has enlisted Ripcord’s robotic services to digitize critical and sensitive documents at a high-resolution and funnel that data into their data platform, which can feed into all the bank’s branches. Everything will be automated and digitally transformed.

With a multi-year contract, Ripcord’s technology will digitize MUFG Bank’s documents. MUFG Bank has hundreds of millions of sheets of paper kept in a central location that isn’t readily accessible to branch locations. With MUFG Bank’s decision to use Ripcord technology to digitally transform these documents and processes, it will improve on a legacy system by making the digital documents immediately accessible by all the branches, materially reducing the time required to retrieve customer information. 

MUFG Bank will utilize Ripcord’s robots and artificial intelligence platform in Japan to enhance its data, making it more efficient and powerful while fully integrated within its large data platform.

On the strength of this partnership, Ripcord will expand throughout Japan. The operations center will establish Ripcord’s beachhead in the Japan market with MUFG Bank as its first customer in the region, making it a highly credible player in the digital transformation space. 

“Ripcord is excited to further our global expansion into Japan while working with Japan’s largest and most respected bank, MUFG Bank,” said Alex Fielding, Founder of Ripcord. “Organizations throughout Japan are looking for ways to digitize content and gain greater efficiencies in their business processes. This partnership will provide us with a strategic foothold to expand further into the country as a whole.”

Canopy Product Updates

Ripcord is also previewing an updated version of its Canopy content services platform, which will be generally available in Q1 of 2020. The version will include a new user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) that includes advanced features for easier access, better presentation, and enhanced discovery of content and data types. Canopy’s new features include: 

• Geolocation Map View: allows users to search by geographical regions and discover content associated with specific assets, branches, or locations. Map View will be especially beneficial in the oil and gas industry for field researchers, or in use cases where content and employees are widely distributed across branches, such as banks or enterprises with multiple offices. 
• Taxonomy View: allows users to define a custom hierarchy to view content, enabling multiple views of their data. Taxonomy removes the difficulty of managing content in a folder structure for enriched vantage points, such as viewing data by location, department, hire dates, etc.
• Large Format Viewer: allows easy zooming and panning of drawings, blueprints, or maps and is ideal for engineering, utilities, and energy sectors.

The research from ARMA InfoCon 2019 also illustrates the need for better search and deeper insights that the Canopy update will provide. Nearly two-thirds of all organizations (60 percent) surveyed report that paper records slow down business processes, and a third (31 percent) say data is difficult to access from paper records. Having the ability to easily extract smart data from paper records would add a lot of important value to their businesses.

“We’re seeing an increased need for content and storage vendors to evolve in order to keep pace with the demands of digital transformation. Ripcord is setting the pace for innovation in the record digitization space by addressing paper-centric and digitally-native content and processes with its smart robotics and content management platform anchored by AI,” said Mike Leone, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “With hardware robots that use computer vision, sensors, and robotic machinery to process records into digital images, and software bots that use AI and machine learning to extract and classify metadata, Ripcord’s value to its customers is more than just digitizing paper-based records. It’s enriching data and driving business processes to achieve optimal decision-making and solutions.”

New Branding, Website & Awards

Ripcord today also unveiled updated branding, including a new website Ripcord.com to better reflect its vision and commitment to delivering a more engaging digital experience. The new website will include expanded educational resources, interactive videos, new use cases, customer stories, and announcements of new members joining the Ripcord team.

Ripcord was also recently the recipient of the Technology Elite Awards and named the “Most Innovative Robotic Digitization Company of 2019.” Ripcord also won the ABBYY ‘Industry Game Changer’ Award for its innovations with its smart content and categorization offerings that help enable RPA and BPM. 

“Our updated branding and recent accolades demonstrate our evolution and innovation in delivering more engaging digital experiences,” said chief digital officer, Wasim Khan. “Ripcord’s value lies in freeing, connecting, and better understanding content and data, and our updated website reflects a cleaner, more engaging way of doing this.”

About Coca-Cola Bottlers' Sales & Services (CCBSS)

Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Sales and Services (CCBSS) is a limited liability company owned by 65+ U.S. independent Coca-Cola Bottlers. CCBSS supports operations for their bottler owners as well as bottler-owned production cooperatives, Coca-Cola North America and other participating beverage partners across the Coca-Cola System. Since 2003, CCBSS has provided a single voice for the North American Coca-Cola system to customers and suppliers through their Customer Business Solution and Procurement divisions. Together with their partners and stakeholders, CCBSS leverages the size and scale of the Coca-Cola System to drive maximum value and win as a system every day.

About MUFG Bank

MUFG Bank, Ltd. is Japan’s premier bank, with a global network spanning around 50 countries. Outside of Japan, the bank offers an extensive scope of commercial and investment banking products and services to businesses, governments and individuals worldwide. MUFG Bank’s parent, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc. (MUFG) is one of the world’s leading financial groups. Headquartered in Tokyo and with over 360 years of history, MUFG has a global network with around 3,000 locations in more than 50 countries. The Group has over 180,000 employees and offers services including commercial banking, trust banking, securities, credit cards, consumer finance, asset management, and leasing. The Group aims to “be the world’s most trusted financial group” through close collaboration among our operating companies and flexibly respond to all of the financial needs of our customers, serving society, and fostering shared and sustainable growth for a better world. MUFG’s shares trade on the Tokyo, Nagoya, and New York stock exchanges.

For more information about MUFG Bank, visit https://www.mufg.jp/english.

About Ripcord

Ripcord is a Silicon Valley-based company disrupting the $62 billion document intelligence space with its cutting-edge Document Intelligence as-a-Service platform. Using advanced robotics and AI, Ripcord digitizes, ingests, classifies, and intelligently extracts and abstracts data from paper and digital records, making them accessible and actionable to enterprise users. Founded in 2015 out of NASA research, Ripcord is backed by the world's leading investors including Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Icon Ventures, Lux Capital, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. For more information, visit www.ripcord.com.