POINT OF VIEW
This point of view will be discussing how implementing Robotic Process Automation in Financial Services can improve business efficiency and customer experience.
What is Robotic Process Automation?
Simply said, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) uses software robots to automate business processes. RPA technology is a platform that enables you to build, deploy and manage software bots that can imitate human action by interacting with digital systems using interfaces designed for people. Actions include navigating systems; understanding what is on the screen; completing keystrokes; extracting and inserting data; and performing defined actions.
RPA bots mimic human interaction with computer interfaces to make processes more efficient.
The use of software robots removes the need to spend time on routine, repetitive, data-heavy processes that impact employee’s workload. By removing the need to do these tasks, staff are now able to focus on the more important, productive tasks that may have been put aside for administration.
PwC estimates that 45% of work activities could be automated. This shows robotic process automation (RPA) is an opportunity to improve the accuracy and timeliness of nearly half of the business processes within an organisation, why not take advantage of RPA?
Within the banking and financial services sector, processes that affect customers and the business itself can be automated. The financial sector is built upon processes that are all important in their own way. Whether they be customer or business-facing, automating business processes can help organisations save money and achieve significant operational efficiency.
How to Set Up Effective Robotic Process Automation in Financial Services?
Robotic Process Automation in financial services can see an improvement of internal efficiency and accuracy through automation of mundane, repetitive, operations.
Virtual employees can also utilise the system 24 hours a day to reduce latency and maximise productivity. On top of that, RPA software-based procedures eliminate the need for human intervention to reduce and eliminate human roles in repetitive manual processes and legacy methods.
When looking at the potential use cases for Robotic Process Automation in financial services, like with other industries and organisations, it is important to not just follow what others are doing. To make RPA work for your organisation, the specific business pains and needs have to be identified and a solution can be found for each specific point. There is no point trying to fit RPA in just for the sake of doing it – you won’t see the full benefits if this is how you go about it.
‘Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency…automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency’
As Joe Kaeser, CEO of Siemens, said, ‘automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency…automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency’. This sums up the need to evaluate the processes already in place to find inefficiencies and business needs before implementing RPA. Automation is not meant to be a temporary solution, rather a solution that becomes part of the business – so why would you make it unproductive?
Gartner has also reported on how many organisations are ignorant to the ineffectiveness of their finance processes and their failing to manage money well. This goes to show how important it is to evaluate existing processes to see how they can be improved upon, and if RPA is the way forward for you.
Gartner also predicts that through 2021, 40% of organisations will have buyer’s remorse due to misaligned usage of RPA, highlighting the importance of doing it right the first time an getting the most out of RPA.
Responsiv offers free process discovery workshops as a way to help businesses assess their existing processes and improve upon inefficiencies.
We also help identify the processes that fit the criteria for intelligent automation and run through how this would be done.
To find out more, contact us today!
Speed Up Key Business Processes within Financial Services
Loan and Mortgage Processing
Long story short, banks and financial institutions can improve customer satisfaction by speeding up loan/mortgage applications and approvals using robotic process automation.
Bots can quality check, compare finances, and process documentation to say whether a person qualifies for a loan or mortgage without the need for human intervention. This not only frees up staff to do more productive work but gets the job done quickly so you can send a response to your customers. By defining rules, you can include exceptions in your qualifying of applications – no stone is left unturned, and no one slips through the net.
The 24-hour capabilities of the bots add to the benefit of robotic process automation in financial services, allowing customers to access services and applications at any hour of the day and still get an answer.
Intelligent robotic process automation in financial services will help improve customer experiences and outcomes, as well as unburdening staff from tedious, repetitive tasks.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, building societies and banks were flooded by mortgage deferral requests. Robots were brought in to decrease response time and process requests to help with this influx of requests and customer support being overrun. One building society managed to decrease response time to 21 seconds, and reduced traffic to the call centre by 75%. These deferrals have to be monitored and eventually expire, all things that RPA bots can do.
Smaller building societies are known for maintaining the services, processes, and modes of work they were founded on. Whilst this has thus far stood the test of time, they are starting to lean towards digital transformation to reach and provide for more customers.
Another society has managed to fully automate the end-to-end mortgage borrowing process. Within 24 hours they can onboard new brokers and networks and have seen an increase in mortgage applications as a result. To add to this, there is the potential for them to automate and optimise around 170 business processes that fit the automation criteria.
This goes to show how technology can help maintain and improve customer experience and access to services, and how organisations may wish to adapt for the post-pandemic normal.
Accelerate Report Generation
Report generation with RPA can help in both front and back-office processes. This could be through speeding up the creation of compliance reports that are mandatory in reporting and tracking fraudulent or suspicious activity, or even standard financial reports of the company’s own position.
Full audit trails can be created for every process, reducing the risk of regulatory failure and fines, thus maintaining and monitoring compliance.
Sticking to the main purpose of the software, RPA removes the need to do the mundane, unwanted tasks required to run an organisation.
Don’t Fall Down the Rabbit Hole of Data
The ability to create master data is also a benefit for the financial services, as it ensures that account and customer information is not duplicated, misused, or splintered across systems in different files.
By collecting master data from multiple systems, you can create gold standard records in one place for use by the people who need it when they need it, producing current and relevant information.
Beyond the benefits of master data, intelligent robotic process automation in financial services will stop the need to rekey information into different systems, saving employees time and improve the accuracy of data transference and storage.
What’s next?
RPA can be used within banking and finance with potential use cases going beyond the general business uses. Benefits can be tailored to fit the specific industry and business needs.
By evaluating your business needs you can see where RPA can optimise your organisation and improve both consumer and employee experiences.
To find out how RPA can benefit your organisation contact Responsiv today!
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