Why, Where, and How of RPA in Banking and Financial Services

In the current highly competitive banking and financial marketplace, banks and other financial institutions are finding ways to evolve and remain competitive. Several banking institutions across the globe are now leveraging Robotic Process Automation to offer exceptional customer experience, increase efficiency in processes, reduce personnel costs and achieve compliance, among many other goals. According to Gartner, 60 percent of big organizations across various industries have already launched RPA, with another 85 percent planning RPA integration by 2022. This piece focuses on all the essential information on RPA and how you can leverage robotics to optimize costs and boost productivity.

Some RPA statistics to think about:

• According to Forrester, the RPA market is expected to surpass $2.9 billion by 2021.
• Gartner reveals about 80 percent of finance leaders have implemented or are planning to implement RPA.
• Deloitte Global RPA Survey reveals RPA will achieve "near-universal adoption" in the next five years.
• A study by Juniper Research reveals Robotic Process Automation (RPA) revenues in the banking industry will reach $1.2 billion by 2023.
• A recent study by KPMG established that Implementing RPA could save up to 50 percent of banks' operational costs.

What is RPA in the Banking and Finance Industry?

Robotics in banking and finance involves the use of robots and AI to automate manual business processes and augment human operations in transactions. Banks use RPA to perform repetitive and mundane tasks such as data entry. Financial institutions also leverage RPA to automate back-office workflows and customer service for their staff to focus on more complex and highly productive tasks.

Why Use RPA in Your Banking Operations

RPA technology can help your institution to increase productivity and boost employee satisfaction. Some of the benefits that come with integrating RPA into your operations include:

Reduce repetitive tasks

RPA can help decrease repetitive tasks that take a lot of person-hours to maintain manually. Automating these tasks can free your employees from the mundane protocols so that their time and talent are utilized on more important responsibilities. Automation will boost not only productivity but also employee job satisfaction.

Decrease the risk of errors

Mistakes in the financial services industry can be incredibly costly. Yet manual processes managed by humans are prone to these errors. Even your best employee makes mistakes while keying in multitudes of numbers and figures. These errors can decrease productivity and impact customer experience. When you automate these mundane processes, you effectively eliminate costly human errors.

Save costs

Although initially, RPA may require substantial investment in infrastructure, training, and management, it delivers significant savings in the long run. Studies reveal most RPA deployments have an ROI of fewer than 14 months. Essentially, RPA can dramatically improve efficiency in banking operations and enable you to do more with less. Improved efficiency affords you more opportunities to establish a unique brand by providing more competitive rates and fee structures, thus passing the savings on to your clients.

Improve customer experience

RPA can help you provide exceptional customer experience and gain a competitive advantage over your peers. RPA provides easy-to-use tools and reliable service designed to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction. These tools can help streamline your mobile and online banking for transactions to be processed rapidly, thus improving customer service.

Improve compliance and audit reporting

Studies reveal banks in the US and Europe have spent $342 billion from 2009 to 2017 on fines due to misconduct, including violation of anti-money laundering rules. RPA can help reduce the risk of non-compliance through exceptional compliance and reporting processes. Robotics can be trained to do each function in a compliant manner, thus eliminating the errors prone to humans. Additionally, RPA solutions generate reports from data automatically while shining a spotlight on any grey areas for you to reduce non-compliant activities in your operations.

Fraud detection

With the rapid growth of digitization, the number of fraudulent transactions targeting the finance sector is also rising. A 2019 report by Clearswift reveals 70 percent of financial companies have experienced a cybersecurity incident in the past year. Notably, the cost of these attacks is highest in the banking industry, reaching $18.3 million annually per company. Monitoring all the transactions manually to identify fraud patterns is untenable for the banking industry. However, RPA can effectively identify potential threats in multiple transactions and raise a red flag or highlight suspicious activity for further investigation.

How to Automate Banking and Finance Operations with RPA

Several processes can benefit from RPA integration in the banking and finance industry. These include:

Customer onboarding and KYC

RPA in customer onboarding can help save time and reduce errors prone to manual entry processes. During customer onboarding, several documents are not in digital format and may need to be verified. You can capture the documents from the KYC database with the help of the optical character recognition technique (OCR) and use RPA to match it against the information filled in the customer form. Once the automation is completed successfully without any discrepancy, the data will be automatically entered into your customer management portal.

Mortgage lending

It takes more than 50 days on average to process a mortgage loan. There are several elements to check, and any slight error can incredibly slow down the entire process. Integrating RPA reduces costly mistakes and speeds up mortgage processing for a better customer experience.

Account closure

Account closure is typically one of the lengthy and time-consuming processes in the financial sector. The process goes through several stages, including identifying account closure requests in the banking applications, communicating with customers, requesting documents, canceling direct debits, and more. RPA can be an effective tool to automate these activities for faster account closure processes.

Loan processing

Manual loan processing is typically a tedious and slow process. RPA can accelerate this process for you to achieve a record 10 to 15 minutes for loan processing. You can also use RPA bots to flag off loans that are due and automate the balance register process.

Get Professional Help Today

Due to the current complex marketplace dynamics and the ever-rising competition from Fintech, banks need to become more agile and flexible. Notably, RPA is the best tool to gain agility and flexibility in your operations. Implementing RPA into your banking operations helps automate some critical banking tasks for you to gain a competitive edge through a great customer experience.

If you need any help getting started with your RPA integration, contact Tagence today to learn how to implement RPA for banking and financial services. Our experts are ready to answer your questions on when to start, where to look, and why it's crucial to get in on the trend now.