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Technology

MUFG taps US robot startup to scan centuries-worth of documents

Ripcord will help Japanese bank move away from paper and hanko stamps

The underground safe at the Bank of Japan: Japanese banks have millions of paper documents stacked away.

PALO ALTO, U.S. -- After nearly 200 years, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Japan's biggest lender, is slowly saying goodbye to the hanko, the carved personal stamps that Japanese customers have used in lieu of signing bank documents since the 1800s.

But phasing out the stamps leaves MUFG with a problem: a vast mountain of paper documents in need of digitizing. For this task, it has brought in California-based startup Ripcord and its army of AI-powered robots.

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