Increasing customer expectations, stringent regulations and heightened competition are making it more important than ever for banks to optimize and modernize their operations. Automation is helping banks worldwide adapt to organizational and economic changes to reduce risk and deliver innovative customer experiences.
Banking automation is applied with the goals of increasing productivity, reducing costs and improving customer and employee experiences – all of which help banks stay ahead of the competition and win and retain customers.
Automation allows banks to connect systems and reduce manual tasks. This in turn reduces employee workloads, helping them to feel more fulfilled and productive as they are equipped with the data and the time they need to provide the best possible experience for customers.
Popular banking automation use cases include: - Customer onboarding - Automating customer onboarding streamlines data collection and verification making the entire process faster whilst ensuring accuracy and compliance.
- Loan origination/credit processing - Automation connects disparate systems, providing visibility of all the information needed to report on statuses and make data-informed decisions to close cases faster.
- Compliance - Automating highly-regulated procedures allows you to build compliance into processes and track it in one platform, providing greater transparency and instant access to an audit trail for more efficient reporting.
- Fraud prevention - Orchestrating data in a single platform provides banks with a holistic view of customers and transactions making it easier to spot unusual activity.
- Back-office operations - Digitizing tasks and workflows reduces time employees spend searching for and filing documents, increasing efficiency, mitigating errors, and reducing costs.
Orchestrating technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence), IDP (Intelligent Document Processing), and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) speeds up operations across departments. Employing IDP to extract and process data faster and with greater accuracy saves employees from having to do so manually.
Applying business logic to analyze data and make decisions removes simpler decisions from employee workflows. Plus, RPA bots can perform tasks previously undertaken by employees at a faster rate and without the need for breaks.
Colombia’s largest bank Bancolombia combined their human, robotics, cognitive and analytic automation technologies to minimize repetitive, manual tasks. As a result, they freed up over 515,000 hours per year in branches with front office automation.
Connect people, applications, robots, and information in a centralized platform to increase visibility to employees across the organization. Greater visibility not only helps provide a view as to whether tasks are performed as they should be, but also provides insight into where any delays are occurring in the workflow. This enhanced visibility also aids decision-making and makes reporting simpler, and helps identify opportunities for improvement.
Award-winning global asset management company, Insight Investment optimized transparency around its end-to-end business processes by visualizing the data stored in Bizagi applications, facilitating process management and further process improvement.
Customers expect fast, personalized experiences from onboarding to any future interactions they have with the bank. Having access to customer information at the right point in an interaction allows employees to better serve customers by providing a positive experience and promoting loyalty, ultimately giving them a competitive edge.
Leading South African financial services group Old Mutual integrated multiple systems into one platform to provide employees with a holistic view of both customers and services available. This helped them to onboard customers 10x faster and provide 9x shorter queues in branch, plus an uplift in sales from service.
Banking organizations are constantly competing not just for customers but for highly skilled individuals to fill their job vacancies. Automating repetitive tasks reduces employee workload and allows them to spend their working hours performing higher-value tasks that benefit the bank and increase their levels of job satisfaction.
One banking organization has used automation to apply a rule in the loan origination process that automatically rejects loans that fail to meet minimum requirements. This reduces employee workload and enables them to focus on the customers that will generate profit.
Automating compliance procedures allows banks to ensure that specified requirements are being met every time and share and analyze data easily. This frees compliance departments to focus on creating a culture of compliance across the organization. In addition, automated systems can identify and flag suspicious activity that poses a threat to the bank and its customers.
This was another benefit of automation for Bancolombia, as automating repetitive and manual data-based tasks reduced operational risk by 28%.
Automation enables banks to respond quickly to changes in the market such as new regulations and new competition. The ability to make changes at speed also facilitates faster delivery of innovative new products and services that give them an edge over their competitors.
If would like to learn more about how automation can accelerate your bank’s transformation efforts, download our free ebook, The Essential Guide to Modernizing Banking Operations.
In addition to insight on how to offer innovative employee experiences, you will also learn how to:
- Create frictionless customer experiences - Respond to regulatory pressures - Bridge gaps in your system with automation
