In this post, we are going to describe 3 RPA use cases in Finance and explain what does RPA stands for in this industry. To remain competitive in today’s digital-first market, banks need to invest in new technologies that streamline their operations and deliver an excellent experience to customers. But all the while, they have to keep costs low and maintain maximum security and compliance. That’s where Robotic Process Automation comes in; RPA offers banks an effective method for addressing these challenges.
Many financial services companies are using RPA to optimize a wide range of back office processes and time-consuming manual tasks that, until recently, required human input. Executives note a direct impact of RPA technologies on performance, staffing issues, error rate, and efficiency levels. According to Forrester Research, RPA will likely become a $29 billion industry by 2021. RPA is especially promising for the financial sector. Capgemini reported that by 2020, the financial services industry could enjoy up to $512 billion in new global revenues thanks to intelligent automation.
Why are banks investing in RPA?
Here are some good reasons why financial services firms are looking into automation tools:
Operational efficiency – financial institutions process a high volume of customer service requests and RPA can help companies automate the manual, repetitive tasks that fill the daily operations of customer service reps: checking order status, opening cases, record updates, and more. Agents can be more efficient as all information is automatically synchronized between systems – agents have all customer information, therefore, won’t inundate clients with questions.
0% error rate – tasks completed by RPA tools are accurate and have a nearly 0% error rate. This means banks experience fewer customer complaints and callbacks, helping customer service reps deliver seamless customer experience.
Focus on customer relations – frontend RPA solutions enable banks to expand their channels of communication. For example, customers can request balance inquiries using other channels such as text. Such RPA systems automate the repetitive tasks agents deal with on a daily basis, saving them time and energy on developing more meaningful relationships with customers.
Now that we’ve covered RPA’s role as a key player in the financial services industry, let’s take a look at how it works in practice.
RPA use cases in Finance
1. Customer Service
Banks deal with hundreds if not thousands customer queries every single day. Responding with low turnaround time is increasingly challenging for companies that want to deliver excellent customer service. That’s where RPA tools can help. Banks use this technology to automate rule-based processes such as account information, application status, and balance information to respond to customers in real-time and reduce turnaround time to seconds. For example, most customers are asked to fill out the Know Your Customer (KYC) form for opening an account. The form includes many customer details that need to be validated by banks as quickly as possible. Financial institutions adopt RPA tools to validate the customer’s identity by matching the data to the customer’s previously known records. The process is quick and accurate, helping banks deliver an optimal experience to their customers. Danske Bank shared some information about their RPA applications in a presentation to the Deloitte Finance Agenda. One of them includes the automation of the customer account onboarding process. The bank has developed a robot that automatically transfers information collected during an onboarding meeting between a bank adviser and a customer. Before the implementation, the adviser needed to enter data into the onboarding platform and then into the customer portal platform – where this would ordinarily take 20-30 minutes during each meeting, it is now reduced to mere seconds.
2. Trade settlement procedures
Another example use case of RPA is in trade settlement procedures. Bank BNY Mellon began adopting RPA as early as 2016 and now uses software robots to optimize its trade settlement processes, among others. Robots are employed to complete tasks such as clearing trades, carrying out order research, and resolving discrepancies. For example, reconciling a failed trade takes a human employee from five to 10 minutes. The software robot can perform the same procedure in a quarter of a second. The implementation of RPA tools has reaped many other benefits for the bank. The company saw an 88% improvement in transaction processing times and account closure validations carried out across five different systems. The accuracy rate of these procedures is 100%. BNY Mellon employees are now free to dedicate more time to operational quality control and outliers.
3. Compliance
Banking is a heavily regulated sector where compliance is critical for smooth operations. Accenture showed that 73% of surveyed compliance officers believe that automation tools, including RPA, can be a crucial enabler in improved use of compliance resources within the next three years. RPA solutions offer 24/7 availability and incredibly high accuracy that improves the quality of the compliance process. Banks are using RPA tools to collect information about transactions and analyze the quality of these transactions against specific validation rules. In case of suspicion, the robot instantly reaches out to the compliance department that can handle the issue. By flagging such problems quickly, RPA helps save financial institutions from reputation damage. In Deloitte’s survey, at least 85% of respondents reported that RPA met or exceeded their expectations in areas such as accuracy, flexibility, and compliance. It’s clear that software robots are on their way to becoming a strategic investment for banks that aim to meet the highest compliance standards.
Driving change in finance
Robotic process automation in banking does much more than just improving selected processes. But to make the most of robots for your organization, you need to carry out a thorough process analysis that will show where investment in RPA technology will bring the best results. Are you looking for an RPA solution for your company? Get in touch with us; a wealth of experience and know-how in implementing automation tools for the financial sector will give you the well-rounded introduction into RPA you’re looking for. We hope that our 3 RPA use cases in Finance have already helped you to understand better how it works, but if you are still feeling lost in RPA automation, read our previous post on How to Identify the Right Processes to Automate and Get Started with Process Automation.