Reduce Cost and Increase Speed Using Robotic Process Automation in Financial Services
Financial Services Face Many Challenges
In an increasingly crowded banking and financial sector, banks and other financial institutions must constantly evolve, remain competitive, and provide exceptional customer experience to users. Some of the top challenges they face include:
- Cybersecurity
With a 38% rise in cyberattacks throughout 2022, security in financial institutions is more crucial than ever. A survey from IDC found that 80% of consumers in developed nations will leave a business if their information is compromised.
- Tightening of regulations and controls
Regulations in the financial services industry continue to increase, especially since the pandemic, and it can cost 10% of operational costs.
- Banking Experiences
According to the Gartner 2021 Digital Business Acceleration Survey, the top two reasons organizations pursue digital projects are to increase customer experiences and employee experiences.
What makes things more difficult is the increased competition as customers have no shortage of financial services to choose from. As a result, many organizations are turning to technology and automation to increase speed, cut costs, and strengthen organizational resilience.
What is RPA?
Robot Process Automation (RPA) is a software technology that allows you to automate various repetitive tasks based on set rules. It can and can fill forms, extract data, format data, as well as review, write and interpret databases. Some tasks may still need human intervention and approval, but RPAs will do the heavy work.
Written By:
Avnish Sharma
Regional Manager South East Asia at Eastern Software Systems
Sherni Makhijani
Digital Marketing at OTI International
As per research, two-thirds of employees world wide feel they are doing the same thing over and over again, 58% said it doesn’t allow them to be as creative, and 60% of executives agree that automation will allow employees to focus on strategic work, driving high-value work.
Using RPA can address key business challenges, such as improving efficiency. 86% leaders who have adopted RPA have seen increased productivity in their companies. Zurich International cut down the time it took for each policy transaction from 4-5 hours to 40-80 minutes.
It also helps reduce costs, as RPA takes over certain tasks, which can cost 3 times lower than having it done manually, saving at least 25-80% of operational costs. On average, avoidable human error leads to 25,000 hours of rework, which can cost up to $878,000 per year.
How can RPA be Used?
There are different kinds of applications of RPA in financial services, some prominent ones include:
- Report Generation
RPA can automate a wide range of reporting processes. Singaporean bank OCBC uses RPA to produce a sales report in 12 minutes, where it would have taken two hours for an employee to perform. Due to this, their management team receives daily reports at the start of the day, instead of the afternoon.
- Customer Onboarding
While collecting personal and financial data of new clients, banks need to authenticate said data through different sources, archive it, and more. This cuts down onboarding time and reduces operational costs.
- Know Your Customer (KYC)
Being a critical process, RPA helps financial institutions automatically collect customer data, or extract data from documents, verify them, assess risk factors, flag non-compliance issues to be reviewed, and more. Banks can spend up to $384 million a year on KYC.
- Loan Processing
RPA can help speed loan processing by extracting information, verifying data, and calculating the ideal decision based on available data. OCBC implemented RPA for their loan processing and saw the time it took to process decreased by 97%, processing over 100 housing loan restructuring applications in a single day, authenticating data, checking for eligibility, suggesting the best restructuring package, and putting that in an email to customers.
- Customer Service
RPA can help make customer service more efficient by performing basic queries and low-priority cases so employees can focus on the more pressing issues. For example, requesting account blockage, card blockage, loan status applications, etc.
Implementing RPAs for a financial service company comes with many benefits, among them are:
- Cost Effective
RPA decreases the time spent manually entering information, resulting in decreased expenses, and is available 24/7.
- More Use for Data
Many organizations are unable to go through all their data in order to gain insights from it, RPA helps process large datasets to interpret data collected.
- Better Customer Experience
With RPA handling low priority queries, employees can focus on handling more complex cases.
- Compliance
RPAs adhere to regulatory compliance guidelines and provide audit trail history.
RPA has so many uses that can help cut down costs while increasing performance and efficiency. implementing RPA can be very transformative for financial organizations willing to take the leap.
For more information, feel free to contact sherni@otiinternational.com
Written By:
Avnish Sharma
Regional Manager South East Asia at Eastern Software Systems
Sherni Makhijani
Digital Marketing at OTI International
