A wealth of data is generated day in, day out in the financial services world, from documentary credits to guarantees, loans and cross-border payments, and today there’s still a huge amount of manual processing involved in managing the process. Banks and financial institutions seek to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and have found A.I and intelligent automation to become their Batman and Robin to Gotham City. Recent studies by Accenture have found that AI adoption could as much as double economic growth rates within the coming decades, with the potential to increase productivity by more than 50% compared to today’s old fashioned IT systems.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) involves the creation of software robots that act as virtual workers who can be rapidly "trained" by business users in an intuitive manner, creating time for the limited and valuable skills of professionals to concentrate on more strategic tasks. Some of the biggest challenges in finance are to reduce costs and support decreasing margins, to improve speed, volumes and quality of information provided, to focus on delivery of value adding insights to the business- which is why RPA is quickly evolving to a new hot topic in the Finance world. Its significant potential to become a disruptor has become evident and an increasing amount of larger players in the financial services sector are either evaluating the possibilities to benefit from this new solution or even proceeding with their first implementations. The RPA implementation burdens (costs and timelines) are relatively insignificant, compared to major IT platform updates, as RPA stands out as a unique path delivering a competitive advantage to a standard practice, that needs be followed for survival.
How can finance prepare for RPA?
• Re-evaluate finance processes: RPA can automate a process as it is, which is a clear advantage of this solution but all existing inefficiencies and duplication's in the process will be repeated by RPA reducing potential benefits. The critical path of the Finance processes may need to be reviewed, some tasks with RPA can result in further delays on tasks, that were not on the critical path before. A clear process documentation will help to manage this change.
• Technology: Leverage legacy systems, RPA can be used as an extension to a existing legacy systems, allowing it to decrease the drawbacks related to inefficient, manual intensive interfaces of those systems.
• People: Refocus human workforce. The people factor will keep an important role in a robotized process. Training and operational management of a robot is done by human specialists. A robot will further proactively involve humans for analysis and decision making at certain steps, where insights and subjective assessment should be used.
RPA has the potential to make the world better. We’re going to see more businesses able to access trade finance and other complex banking products – which is going to help businesses around the world grow. Not only this, it’s going to cost less for businesses to gain financing too – all the while safe in the knowledge that robots are going to stop any maverick risk takers within the bank from stepping out of line, which is what regulation is meant for. Sound tempting? Make sure to join us at Automate 2018, which is one of the first events in the industry to sound the alarm bell that Intelligent Automation is here and it’s here to stay.
Hannah Mitchell
Content Director, Automate USA
