Financial transaction processing systems and methods

A system for use in processing a financial transaction based at least in part upon visual data representing information related to said transaction and formed on a document having a particular format, said system comprising:

• a. an optical scanner for generating a scanned image of at least a portion of said document containing said visual representation;
• b. an image characterization generator for generating recognition characteristics from said scanned image;
• c. a recognition characteristic comparator for comparing said recognition characteristics to respective sets of reference recognition characteristics generated from respective other transaction documents having different respective formats and for determining therefrom whether said particular format matches one of the respective formats of said other documents;
• d. a field location generator for determining, based upon the one respective format when the particular format is determined to match said one respective format, location of a field in said scanned image to which optical character recognition is applied to generate therefrom said information;
• and
• e. an image processor for utilizing optical character recognition to generate said visual data from said location.