Banking and automation: how catastrophe led to RPA adoption

Our Head of Banking and Insurance, Harri Lauslahti recently wrote an article for Global Banking & Finance Review explaining why UK financial services are surging ahead with automation while their global counterparts lag behind. You can read the full article online here: Banking and automation: how catastrophe led to innovation?

After almost causing a global catastrophe, the 2008 financial crash paved the way for a technological revolution in the banking and finance sector, with the industry embracing innovative solutions such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA). A wave of legislation swept through financial institutions at the time and banks condemned the regulations saying it tied their operational hands with unnecessary paperwork which would impact customers. As a result, organisations began to explore solutions and RPA was one of them. It addressed concerns by automating critical business processes with the use of software ‘robots’ or Artificial Intelligence (AI) workers, the ideal tool for automating costly and time-consuming manual processes.

Removing mundane tasks

RPA adoption has been steadily gaining ground and now one in four UK organisations have adopted it with more planning to follow suit. According to a recent PwC survey, ‘PwC Global Fintech Report 2019: UK financial services firms trailblazing on automation efforts’, 37 per cent of UK respondents have implemented RPA compared to just 28 per cent globally. Financial institutions deal with millions of customer documents and information on a regular basis. For example, a credit card company validating customer information for a credit card needs to verify multiple documents. If carried out manually, this process is labour intensive, costly and can have a negative impact on customer experience. Financial organisations have multiple manual and repetitive tasks across many functions – including customer service, deposits and fraud detection and many of these processes are ready for robot automation.

Cost reduction and customer satisfaction

The sales branch operation is another area ready for RPA and is a winning move with customers. For instance, software robots enable a faster response to customer requests, deliver fast credit applications, loan certificates and overdraft notifications to name a few. Faced with a number of manual processes and more effective technology options, it is unsurprising that UK financial services in general is rapidly adopting RPA. Insurers and other financial services are turning to RPA to reduce costs, provide better customer service and make complex regulatory implementations work more efficiently.

Improving customer interaction

One of the unfamiliar benefits of RPA is that it doesn’t require heavy lifting from IT teams. RPA software can simply be installed on an end user’s laptop without the need for developer configuration and can be managed from a central server. This simplicity questions why UK organisations are adopting RPA, but their global counterparts aren’t following suit. The PwC survey revealed that UK financial services rank personal one-to-one contact with customers as one of the most important objectives. Contrarily, their counterparts rank personal human contact as 10 out of 11. As a result, this strongly indicates that they are yet to realise the true value of using RPA as an important technology that can grow their customer base and satisfaction.

To carry on reading you can access the full article here:

https://www.globalbankingandfinance.com/banking-and-automation-how-catastrophe-led-to-innovation/