How Robotic Process Automation in Financial Services Adds Value to Your Business

There’s an expectation for IT leaders in the financial services sector to maximize the investment of robotic process automation (RPA) from the start. More than the standard use cases, it’s essential for your organization to implement value-adding instances of automation that improve customer-facing processes, profitability, and customer satisfaction across your organization. Here are a few examples to consider as you explore further uses for RPA within your own business.

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Real game-changing insight is always built on accurate and clean data. Though data collection and data manipulation are essential to achieving meaningful analytics, the process itself is tedious and diverts human analysts and business users from productive work.

When Figure Eight conducted their 2019 State of AI and Machine Learning Survey, they found 75.8% of data experts still spent 25% of their time or more on data management and the data cleansing process. This takes away time from work that requires their expertise, problem-solving, and creativity. Worse still, the average business user is likely struggling even more with quality issues and manipulation to elevate the standard of the raw data to their needs.

In recent years, technical leaders at Deutsche Bank have embraced RPA tools as a way of resolving these and other issues – especially in their back and mid-office processes. Like many traditional banks, Deutsche Bank still used manual processes to handle trade finance, cash operations, loan operations, and taxes functions, which slowed operations and diverted employees from more challenging work.

By implementing RPA, the multinational investment bank was able to achieve 30% to 70% automation in the above functions. Moreover, by automating data sharing and collection processes, Deutsche Bank fostered a higher degree of quality and accuracy across their data which enabled end users to spend more time evaluating the findings of their analytics.

Expedited Account Onboarding

Before COVID-19 reached the U.S., J.D. Power’s 2020 U.S. Retail Banking Advice Satisfaction Study already found that nearly 31% of new accounts were opened through a banking website or mobile app, up from 22% in 2019. After lockdowns began, mobile banking registrations jumped up by 200% in April alone. Even as states reopened, more buyers continued to gravitate to digital channels, increasing the importance of the digital customer experience – especially the account application process.

One of the largest financial institutions in the Netherlands used RPA to increase the speed of verification checks and online applications. Before implementing automation, their internal fraud detection team implemented over 3,000 investigations a week, slowing down valid applications in the process with tedious data gathering. That all changed upon deploying RPA solutions.

When verification checks were manual, the average case took 25 minutes to validate and close. With automation tools in place, the financial institution was able to finish them in two minutes, saving 254 hours a week on the verification process. Moreover, RPA tools were able to increase data quality by 40% and increase the quality of their digital onboarding experience from the start.

Reducing the Cost of Workflows

COVID-19 has had an asymmetrical impact on different financial services segments. As Deloitte notes, banks have weathered the pandemic better through greater account and revenue stability while mortgage companies have struggled due to lower liquidity and an increase in payment delinquencies and foreclosures. All that aside, there’s still pressure for financial organizations across the spectrum to reduce their expenses in the face of intensified market uncertainty.

With the number of repeatable tasks within any financial organization, the opportunities for reducing costs with RPA solutions are almost endless and pressing to adopt. Consider the insurance claims process. There are plenty of manual workflows that do not require human oversight, consisting of repetitive work requiring little to no creativity or problem solving.

Entering data in your insurance CRM. Auditing and validating claims for data quality issues. Identifying cross-selling or upselling opportunities. All of these processes and more can be handled with the right RPA rules in place, allowing insurers to reallocate their workforce to more productive assignments and save on labor expenses.

Zurich Insurance Group, the largest insurer in Switzerland, was dedicated to make $1 billion in cost improvements by 2018 and viewed RPA solutions as a viable component of that strategy. In the initial pilot program, they evaluated a number of workflows in their claims processes and identified prime opportunities for automation. Their six week trial was able to reduce the cost of their claims processes by 51% while also enhancing the customer experience and delivery timelines along the way.

Increasing the Success of RPA Solutions

That is only a smattering of the possible results of robotic process automation in financial services. Any number of other use cases can help to create a smoother customer process, increase CSAT scores, and even help with fraud analytics. As the technology evolves in sophistication, even more routine workflows will be easier to automate, enhancing the capabilities of organizations that embrace these opportunities with open arms.

However, the intricacy of the tasks or desired level of autonomy can complicate RPA implementation. Those financial services organizations without internal automation experts will need to consider recruiting tech talent or working with an RPA solutions provider. The decision often comes down to not only the intended goals of an RPA project but the long-term needs of an organization.

For example, when one of our clients reached out to the w3r team about robotic process automation, they had already recognized that an RPA solutions partner was a good fit for their circumstances. They knew that the right partner could help them transition beyond their current slow and ineffective processes, allowing them to spend more time on in-depth analysis rather than gathering and cleansing data.

To accelerate their analysis, the w3r team developed bots in UI Path to auto-generate reports on behalf of the client’s analysts. The Appian dashboard we implemented presented their data in a visualized and drilled-down format that was much easier for end users and stakeholders to evaluate. The result was an 80% reduction in workforce effort used to create reports, documents, and deeper analysis.

Ready to learn more about how robotic process automation can help your business? Contact our experts to help you identify opportunities and create a plan of action.

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