September 5, 2024
As robotic process automation experts with years of experience, we help banks and financial organizations streamline their operations and outpace rivals by figuring out the most promising use cases for robotic process automation, defining the implementation roadmap, and helping utilize the technology in your business.
additional AI value for the global banking industry annually
McKinsey
the estimated global RPA and Hyperautomation market size in 2027
Research and Markets
the estimated RPA services and software market size in 2025
Forrester
In this video, Itransition’s RPA Center of Excellence demonstrates how financial data extraction and processing can be automated with the integration of AI. See how the bot processes invoices, extracts relevant information, and updates the database, eliminating hours of work.
In the 2023 Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation, Gartner highlights four RPA vendors among its leaders. Each of the platforms can efficiently automate banking processes thanks to pre-built modules for financial operations and APIs for solid integrations with the banking IT ecosystem.
There are several important steps to consider before starting RPA implementation in your organization.
Conduct a detailed assessment, choosing the right use cases
Evaluate the ability of the shortlisted RPA vendors to meet all your requirements
Build a comprehensive RPA adoption framework
Selecting the right processes for RPA is essential for success. Banks have thousands of repetitive processes for potential RPA automation, and relying on intuition rather than objective analysis to select use cases can be detrimental.
Selecting RPA use cases comes down to a company-wide assessment of all the processes based on a clearly defined set of criteria. Below we provide an exemplary framework for assessing processes for automation feasibility. The processes above a cutoff point can be selected for automation.
Selecting a trustworthy RPA platform requires careful consideration of the following factors:
In addition to the vendor’s offer for the banking sector, consider the platform’s capability to expand beyond rule-based automation and introduce intelligent automation. Complementing RPA with AI and data science will help automate more complex processes, simplifying data classification and making business decisions.
After the initial RPA setup, your business users will need to automate new processes, so ease of use for employees is crucial. You can opt for a free trial to check the bot creation interface and test convenience features, like a macro recorder, a template library, or chatbot-powered automation scenarios generation.
To function smoothly, RPA bots need to constantly interact with various business applications. Pay attention to out-of-the box integrations the vendor offers and check if they include the solutions in your IT ecosystem.
Requirements gathering
Backup plan
Running a pilot project
Performance assessment
While retail and investment banks serve different customers, they face similar challenges. Regardless of the niche, automating low-value-adding tasks is one of the most effective ways to realize employees’ full potential, achieve superior operational efficiency, and significantly increase customer satisfaction.
Postbank, one of the leading banks in Bulgaria, has adopted RPA to streamline 20 loan administration processes. One seemingly simple task required human employees to distribute received payments for credit card debts to appropriate customers and check data across multiple systems. Before RPA implementation, seven employees had to spend four hours a day completing this task. The custom RPA tool based on the UiPath platform did the same 2.5 times faster without errors while handing only 5% of cases to human employees. Postbank automated other loan administration tasks, including customer data collection, report creation, fee payment processing, and gathering information from government services.
CGD is the oldest and largest financial institution in Portugal with an international presence in 17 countries. Like many other old multinational financial institutions, CGD realized that it needed to catch up with the digital transformation but struggled to do so due to the inflexibility of its legacy systems. When it comes to RPA implementation in such a big organization with many departments, establishing an RPA center of excellence (CoE) is the right choice. To prove RPA feasibility, after creating the CoE, CGD started with the automation of simple back-office tasks. Then, as employees expanded their understanding of the technology and more stakeholders were involved, the bank gradually expanded the number of use cases. As a result, in two years, RPA helped CGD streamline over 110 processes and save around 370,000 employee hours.
KAS Bank, an independent Dutch bank founded over two centuries ago, is a leading European provider of custodian services to institutional investors and financial institutions. KAS Bank wanted to solve one of the most recurring problems a modern bank faces: high operational costs and opted for RPA to solve it. Like CGD, KAS Bank carefully explored RPA use cases, conducted multiple proofs of concepts, and only then engaged in an enterprise-wide implementation. This calculated approach helped the bank to reveal various technical bottlenecks and discover the most value-adding RPA use cases. With five RPA bots, the bank automated 20 financial business processes, including treasure operations, obligation payments, internal invoicing, and calculating and booking. Importantly, while the goal of this RPA strategy was to reduce costs, automation significantly improved the quality of KAS Bank’s business processes.
UBS is a multinational investment bank present in more than 50 countries. After the Swiss Federal Council allowed commercial companies to apply for loans with zero interest rates because of the pandemic, UBS, like many other investment banks, had to deal with an unprecedented spike in loan requests. When they could not process the amount of loans using conventional methods of loan request processing, UBS turned to RPA. In collaboration with Automation Anywhere, the bank implemented RPA just in 6 days, resulting in a reduction of request processing time from 30-40 minutes to 5-6 minutes. “RPA has been really helpful to actually show the people on the ground that we can break barriers pretty quickly, which probably previously using other tools and traditional methods of development wouldn’t be as agile and fast,” said Karolina Mikolajow, Executive Director, UBS Investment Bank.
RPA has been really helpful to actually show the people on the ground that we can break barriers pretty quickly, which probably previously using other tools and traditional methods of development wouldn’t be as agile and fast.
Here are some of the most prominent benefits of financial process automation:
Easy to scale
Saves time
Minimizes IT department involvement
Cuts down expenses
Facilitates compliance reporting
Increases employee efficiency
Reduces human errors
Implements seamlessly
Benefits
Despite the numerous benefits RPA can bring and its comparatively undisruptive implementation, adopting this technology is not easy. Here are the three most recurring challenges that financial institutions face when trying to integrate RPA into their operations and how we can help address them:
Resistance to change remains one of the most common hurdles that companies face during RPA adoption. Employees get accustomed to their way of doing daily tasks and often can’t admit that a new approach is more effective.
Change management is pivotal to successful RPA adoption. As soon as it becomes clear that RPA implementation is the right business strategy, banks need to create comprehensive change management programs to help employees shift their mindsets and make the transition as smooth as possible.
For successful automation, the processes need to be easily standardized, i.e. follow a clear set of rules. However, when it comes to large multinational enterprises, standardizing becomes difficult and resource-intensive.
To ensure enterprise-wide standardization, the business should define processes for RPA automation, document them, analyze their performance, and design universal workflows descriptions. The first iterations of process standardization may not be the most successful, that’s why it’s important to test them out, outline inefficiencies, and handle them in the following iterations. Once the tried-and-true standard is defined, RPA bots will easily follow a string of steps, leaving a consistent audit trail.
IT departments often have too much on their hands to support RPA implementation. In this current age of digital transformation, bank IT departments are already spending considerable resources for the support and maintenance of existing IT ecosystems.
While RPA is much less resource-demanding than other automation solutions, it still requires the IT department's buy-in. That is why banks need C-executives to get support from IT personnel as early as possible. In general, assembling a team of existing IT employees that will be dedicated solely to the RPA implementation is crucial.
RPA software can help banking organizations take a step closer toward effective process automation. The unique benefit of RPA in the banking sector is that bots can be easily implemented into existing banking systems, allowing companies to modernize their IT infrastructure without abandoning legacy core systems.
As a result, with the right use case chosen and a proper configuration, RPA in the banking industry can significantly accelerate core processes, lower operational costs, and enhance productivity, driving more high-value work. Reach out to Itransition’s RPA experts to implement robotic process automation in your bank.
An average bank employee performs multiple repetitive and tedious back-office tasks that require maximum concentration with no room for mistakes. RPA is poised to free employees from performing repetitive activities and allow them to spend more on creative tasks that require emotional intelligence and cognitive input. According to Gartner, process improvement and automation play a key role in changing the business model in the banking and financial services industry.
Augmenting RPA with artificial intelligence and other innovative technologies is a definitive next step toward digital transformation. According to McKinsey, the “AI-first” institution will yield greater operational efficiency via the extreme automation of manual processes (a “zero-ops” mindset), and the replacement or augmentation of human decisions by advanced diagnostics.
Service
Itransition helps financial institutions drive business growth with a wide range of banking software solutions. Book your consultation.
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Robotic process automation transforms business processes across multiple industries and business functions. Implement RPA with a trustworthy partner.
Insights
Learn how RPA helps companies streamline their financial operations and increase business efficiency. Explore RPA challenges and get implementation tips.
Insights
Explore the top 10 use cases and successful implementation examples of robotic process automation for various industries.
Insights
Explore the top ten RPA benefits for your business, supported by examples from across industries, as well as RPA market trends and adoption barriers.
