Forecast to add $1trillion in value to the global banking sector, automation has become an increasingly prominent feature of the digital revolution that continues to sweep across the provision of financial services around the world.
Here to identify both the benefits of its implementation and how it can be utilised to its full potential, Brian Halpin, senior vice president at Blue Prism, discusses the importance of putting intelligent automation into action and the strategic uses of automation to create effectiveness.
Halpin works closely with Blue Prism’s largest customers to help them integrate Blue Prism’s Digital Workforce as a strategic capability of their business operations. Prior to joining Blue Prism, he led the global automation programme at HSBC and established robotic process automation (RPA) as a core capability for the Bank of Ireland.
Halpin has hands-on experience in many use cases across large scale cost reduction, customer experience improvement and risk reduction.
How can banks harness automation to its fullest value?
Automation has become vital for future competitiveness and diversity in financial services. This has become apparent in the way that financial institutions are aggressively deploying automation technologies. This implementation has only accelerated during the Covid-19 crisis, with digital ecosystems re-shaping how financial services are discovered, assessed, purchased and delivered, during a period where workforces had to adapt to hybrid working.
Automation technologies could contribute an additional $1trillion annually in value across the global banking sector – through increased sales, cost reduction and new or unrealised opportunities. However, this value is still being left on the table – primarily because there are well-documented automation challenges. These include a lack of tactical and transparent support for automation and heavily siloed deployment within organisations, resulting in disconnects within and across digital transformation efforts.
There are two fundamental factors to understand: the strategic opportunities offered by intelligent automation, and how it can drive all elements of growth and combinatorial innovation. Furthermore, they have been anticipating how automation can be deployed to address inevitable competitive demands driven by escalating customer expectations on digital banking.
Here are two examples of banks that put intelligent automation into action and reaped the rewards:
Europe – where customer expectations are at the heart of what they do
One of Europe’s oldest and largest banks, serving more than 10 million customers in multiple countries, discovered key advantages in service value, speed to market and an enhanced customer experience from intelligent automation implementations. More than 300 acquisitions led to a complicated operating environment with no core banking system. Intelligent automation, however, enabled the bank to manage operations across legacy estates, using APIs to connect systems and relieve problems.
The senior automation lead describes its IA platform as the ‘arms and legs’ that pull data from systems and cognitive tools such as machine learning (ML) and optical character recognition as the ‘brains’ that analyse and interpret it. The bank estimates it has accomplished a significant 150 per cent improvement in overall efficiency from its automation and anticipates further profits from development enhancements in 2021.
The bank also estimates it has obtained an additional 30 to 50 per cent value to date in overall enterprise effectiveness. This resulted in higher transaction volumes, better regulatory compliance, and improved service quality, availability and timeliness.
Through automation platforms, enterprise efficiency has increased and brought significant growth to customer and employee satisfaction, in return contributing to higher revenues. On regulatory compliance, the complicated ‘know your customer’ (KYC) remediation process is now supported by digital workers and presented in dashboard formats for management decision-making.
By improving an infrastructure platform for innovation, the bank is achieving transformational gains they did not set out to originally accomplish. Digital workers take on many roles, for example; chatbots that automate customers’ bank statement requests and accountants that read income statements from customers, saving time for their colleagues on the front line.
The bank has already realised an estimated 30 per cent additional enablement value to date from its more than 500 digital workers. This enabled the bank to rapidly develop and deploy processes giving customers access to government pandemic aid and relief funds.
North America – combining human and digital workers multiplies outcomes
2015 saw a major Canadian bank adopt a new purpose-driven management philosophy and value-positioned attitude of improving managerial agility and enhancing customer experiences. A key focus involved transforming disjointed operating processes on an end-to-end basis but from the customer’s perspective.
Consequently, the automation business case was based on increasing the value of the bank’s services as measured by customer metrics – retention rates, service expansion, and improved net promoter scores – rather than simply ‘doing (bad) things faster’.
Taking a responsive approach, assisted by design thinking, the bank realised that a cohesive customer data structure was a crucial prerequisite for improving the service experience. A front-end AI and machine learning tool was implemented with their Blue Prism platform to capture, structure, and curate existing customer data in a shared repository supporting multiple service lines.
When the Covid-19 pandemic required a major government response, for example, the bank was able to develop custom automation in just a few days to support massive government referral and aid programmes. The bank was able to complete thousands of aid applications, attracting new customers and generating widespread public goodwill and reputational equity.
In addition to efficiency savings estimated at more than 200 per cent from the ability to access and use previously trapped data, the bank also estimated a 400 per cent gain in enterprise effectiveness. The technology platform enabled a new organisational structure built on a combination of human and digital workers that could better match task times and volumes to appropriate resources.
What can these use cases teach us?
Leaders of all organisations must begin with a focus on customer satisfaction and competition, with an aim to create an end-to-end business process design that accelerates digital innovation. By ‘seeing the business through the customer’s eyes’, the bank can use automation to improve every aspect of the customer experience, rather than automating ineffective processes that weren’t beneficial to customers.
A successful digital platform required both a flexible and knowledge base which, with strong governance and disciplined behaviours, forms part of the enablement platform and accelerates strategic use of automation technologies. Embracing a strategic mindset in utilising intelligent automation is critical in capturing maximum value.
Without this view, the strategic uses of automation for greater effectiveness and enablement are foregone by tactical local initiatives, focused narrowly on what can easily be measured such as cost savings and cost avoidance.
