Banks and their employees are under enormous strain during these extraordinary times. Robotic automation solutions can help them to improve operational efficiencies, improve the employee experience and enhance customer service as they navigate the pandemic landscape.
Unlocking the value of RPA in banking
Banks have faced a challenging environment as a result of the pandemic—among them compressed revenues, the need to rapidly pivot to work-from-home operating models, and the imperative of helping their clients navigate the crisis. This context has prompted financial institutions to increase investment in robotic process automation (RPA).
RPA solutions enable banks to automate mundane and repetitive processes in the back-office to elevate efficiencies and service levels. Examples of these rule-based tasks include filling in the same information in multiple places, reentering data, or copying and pasting. Server-based software robots are simply better at doing this sort of back-office work than human beings.
Adopting RPA enables banks to rapidly scale up capacity to address rising volumes of service queries—building a robot workforce that can work 24/7, that never tires, and that can work with a higher degree of accuracy than a human. This can translate into significant cost savings as well as a more consistent customer experience.
Attended automation in banking
This does not mean taking humans out of the workforce—instead, it means relieving them of tedious, routine work so that they can focus on the human dimensions of interacting with customers. Automation technology can add even more value for the banking workforce when the concept is expanded to encompass attended automation.
This refers to virtual assistants that live on an employee’s desktop and help them to complete repetitive desktop tasks faster and more accurately. Such a bot might populate a form for the employee or provide employees with links to data and real-time next best-action guidance as they help a customer to open a new account.
The combination of RPA bots and attended automation can solve many pain points for banks at a time when customer service and operational efficiency matter more than ever. The return on investment can be impressive. Consider the example of a European financial institution that deployed RPA and attended automation in its fraud management call center.
The solution enabled the company to reduce average handling time for call wrap-up by 82 percent. The organization now handles 8,000 alerts a month with 99 percent accuracy in reducing fraudulent activity. Not only has the bank managed to exceed SLAs, but satisfaction levels among employees in the contact center have improved dramatically.
Use cases for RPA in banking
Account opening, account closure and customer onboarding:
RPA can be used to streamline many of the cumbersome processes involved in opening a new account or closing an existing one—from capturing and verifying the customer’s information, cascading it across multiple systems, and conducting know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) checks.
Compliance:
Attended automation bots can help ensure that employees comply with regulations and company policies by, for example, prompting employees to read disclaimers. They can ensure that all compliance related-tasks are completed before the employee continues on to other tasks when, for instance, discussing a mortgage application with a customer.
Compliance reports:
Manually collating and verifying the data needed for compliance reports such as suspicious activity reports is a tedious affair. RPA can help extract the necessary data from multiple systems, validate it and package it in an understandable format—potentially saving days of human effort.
Credit card processing:
RPA can automate many of the more cumbersome processes involved in credit card processing—from conducting credit checks to dispatching cards. RPA systems can follow rules-based processes to, for example, approve an application within minutes.
Cross-selling:
Attended automation bots can arm employees with rich customer insights as they talk to clients about banking products and services. They can prompt employees with relevant sales promotions or offers based on that customer’s unique history with the bank. The bot can also help an employee to close the deal with sales scripts.
Customer service:
RPA bots can be paired with AI-driven chatbots or IVR systems to resolve basic, low priority customer queries such as account enquiries or contact detail changes without human intervention. Agents’ time can be freed for complex and value-added customer interactions, and customers don’t need to hold for an agent to get a simple question answered.
Fraud detection:
A rules-driven RPA solution can flag potential fraud, for example, if multiple transactions take place in a short time, and hand the case over to a human to investigate.
Mortgage/loan processing:
RPA enables the automation of loan initiation, document processing, financial comparisons, credit scoring, quality control, and more. This can help clear the typical bottlenecks in a loan application and shave days of the time it takes to approve a loan or mortgage.
Steps to implementing RPA in a banking business
There is far more to deploying and scaling up an intelligent automation program in a bank than deploying a technology and hoping the value rolls in. This is especially the case with attended automation rollouts, because of the human factor they add to the equation. These automations tend to be more complex than pure RPA deployments.
Best practices to consider may include:
- Strategy
Many banks have deployed RPA in a piecemeal, tactical fashion. Now is the time to take a more strategic and coordinated approach. The bank should ask why it wants to automate and what benefits it hopes to achieve. A good place to begin is to consider what the strategic objectives are—reducing operational costs, enhancing service, or streamlining compliance. It’s also important to consider the key indicators and measures for success.
- Think about the operating model
Organizations that successfully scale and realize value from automation generally put in place the right governance and operating models. They will think about challenges such as change management, business and end-user buy-in, and access to the right skills before they commence with the automation program.
A Centre of Excellence (CoE) can help lay down the foundation for a successful, large-scale automation program. The CoE becomes a magnet for developing and attracting the necessary skills and capabilities. It invites every business operation across the organization to identify needs for optimization and uncover opportunities for increasing efficiency and reducing costs.
- Identify candidates for automation
Once a bank has determined its strategic approach and drivers for automation, it’s can look at the practicalities of designing and delivering the automations. Start by breaking down the processes to be automated, then rebuild them with an eye toward efficiency and an “automation-first” design ethic.
Tools such as the NICE Automation Finder can be harnessed to identify business processes that are ripe for automation. It is a scientifically driven approach rooted in precise desktop data analytics. This step should include a calculation of the expected costs and efficiency to be delivered by the RPA implementation.
How NICE can help
NICE not only has leading automation solutions for the back-office, but also an unparalleled understanding of what it takes to scale attended automation and cognitive automation in the banking sector. Contact us to learn more about using RPA to address your business challenges in the COVID era and beyond.
