However, the introduction of Open Banking and PSD2, together with the proliferation of fintech firms and analytical insights, are challenging brick-and-mortar banks and other financial institutions (FIs).
Today, banks are forced to invest heavily in future-proof technologies that streamline their processes, reduce operating costs, and improve customer experience to protect their market share and buoy returns. What’s more, they are required to ensure maximum security and compliance excellence, all while being relied on legacy online banking systems that can hardly be upgraded.
What Is Robotic Process Automation in Banking?
Notwithstanding the adoption of modern digital innovations, the financial sector is still famous for costly operations and lengthy procedures related to data accumulation, processing, and exchange. These facts make banking a perfect platform for RPA implementation.
So, what is banking automation? — RPA (Robotic Process Automation) merges cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to automate rule-based, repetitive, and often time-consuming activities associated with customer service, data entry, security measures, and more.
The use of RPA and AI in banking allows businesses to not only improve the accuracy and efficiency of back-end task execution but also enables employees’ to focus on more complex, mission-critical duties.
Financial institutions and banks, including DBS, OCBC, Sumitomo Mitsui, Bancolombia, Heritage Bank, Federal Bank, and others, are already reaping the benefits associated with the realized banking automation system projects. Moreover, RPA revenues in financial services are projected to hit $1.2 billion by 2023.
Wheres and Hows of Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation in Financial Services
Financial institutions process millions of consumer documents and data elements accumulated from various sources. Meanwhile, manual validation of forms and applications may take days, affecting customer satisfaction, and inciting their attrition. To prevent that, robotic process automation in financial services is often applied to the following processes:
- Know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) checks;
- Customer service/onboarding;
- Mortgage loan processing;
- Data retrieval;
- Report generation;
- Account opening/closing;
- Fraud screening;
- Credit card processing;
- General ledger management;
- Compliance.
Moreover, robotic process automation in financial services is often combined with AI to understand natural language in messages and emails to resolve customer queries, or with optical character recognition (OCR) technology to read physical documents and digitize them for further validation.
Things You Don’t Know About RPA Automation in Banking
So, increasing accuracy, reducing cost, and improving efficiency are the core advantages of automation in the banking sector, but what else is worth knowing? Below are seven facts about process automation, that should be taken into account while considering robotics for your business.
- Gradual automation. Most stakeholders believe that bots should be integrated into all the procedures. However, partial implementation is a good start for testing and further planning. You can start with data entry, RPA bank reconciliation, and continue with security checks or report creation.
- Visual learners. It’s a general practice to create step-by-step guides for actions that you want to be automated by software and utilize a scripting language or API to realize that. However, in the case of robotic process automation for financial services, the system learns by watching somebody performing a task in the graphical user interface (GUI) and creates a list of activities to replicate the process.
- Smooth implementation. Robotics in the financial industry doesn’t require customized software or deep integration with the entire system. Consequently, it can be embedded into obsolete banking infrastructure with no need to re-develop it, thus saving time and budget.
- Multifunctional assistants. One robot can carry out numerous different tasks, and it’s not limited to one particular function. A bot can complete financial data automation and then switch to password resets, for example. Once you define a process, as many robots as needed can be promptly added to execute it.
- Full mimetism. RPA bots in financial services imitate the entire workflow of a human, including the login process. They can also create, send, and receive emails and messages, as well as schedule calls.
- Knowledge keepers. For most financial institutions, retirement or resignation of an employee is implied with the loss of knowledge and experience. It may take much time for new employees to get acquainted with the system, learn the necessary tools and techniques. The application of robotics in the banking industry can bridge this gap by capturing and automating many of the existing processes.
- Need for care. Similar to your human employees, bots in RPA need care and support. Once developed, tested, and implemented, we recommend our clients to provide regular supervision to make sure that robots operate properly and are able to meet the desired goals. Significant system changes and updates can also affect bots working on those systems.
These days, RPA in financial services arouses intense interest among business executives and investors. Many institutions are rushing to adopt the latest tools and banking automation trends in the hope of better productivity, improved customer experiences, errorless operations, and cost savings. However, the outcomes are still mixed and mainly due to a lack of implementation strategy, clear ROI, or skilled RPA engineers in place.
TEAM International is one of the leading end-to-end robotic process automation vendors with a proven track record in the monetary sector. Being the official UiPath partner, we help reputed banks and financial service providers improve accuracy by 95 percent and reduce costs by 50 percent in the first year. Contact us today to start your effective RPA journey and pave the way to smarter business operations.
