Right. What is meant here by "Robotic process automation" here is screen scraping in difficult cases.
I used to have to do that. Around 1999 I had a nightmare written in Perl which could scrape human-readable financial statements in text or HTML filed with the SEC to extract a few basic numbers. All financial statements have roughly the same data, but they're all formatted differently. I used to have a database with a sizable list of euphemisms for "net loss".
For a while, the SEC made companies submit that information in XML, which they did badly. Then the SEC removed that requirement. Then they re-instated it with a better system, which is where everybody gets that data now. It took about 15 years before everybody was on board with this.
I used to have to do that. Around 1999 I had a nightmare written in Perl which could scrape human-readable financial statements in text or HTML filed with the SEC to extract a few basic numbers. All financial statements have roughly the same data, but they're all formatted differently. I used to have a database with a sizable list of euphemisms for "net loss". For a while, the SEC made companies submit that information in XML, which they did badly. Then the SEC removed that requirement. Then they re-instated it with a better system, which is where everybody gets that data now. It took about 15 years before everybody was on board with this.