Robotic process automation in banking:
use cases and adoption tips

Robotic process automation in banking: use cases and adoption tips

October 16, 2023

Kate Aleksandrovich
by Kate Aleksandrovich, Head of RPA Center of Excellence
RPA in banking means using advanced business process automation tools to automate many mundane and repetitive tasks, allowing employees to focus on more value-adding and customer-centric activities. In a nutshell, RPA emulates human actions interacting with the software while exponentially increasing efficiency.

Banks now actively turn to robotic process automation experts to streamline operations, stay afloat, and outpace rivals. We help to figure out the most potent use cases for robotic process automation in banking, outline real-life RPA application examples, define the implementation mindset, and provide tips on adopting 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

Top 10 RPA use cases in banking

Now let’s figure out some of the most potent RPA in banking use cases:

Customer onboarding

Banks deal with an avalanche of regulatory requirements when onboarding new clients. On top of gathering personal and financial data, bank employees verify that data through approved governmental organizations, set up an account, and establish data archiving and monitoring processes. An RPA system can automate most of these processes, significantly decreasing operational costs, risks, and the time it takes to onboard a new client.

Onboarding request

3–6 weeks

$2,000–$5,000

Document gathering

1–4 weeks

$1,000–$5,000

Background verification

2–4 weeks

$1,000–$5,000

Credit terms setup

1–3 weeks

$500–$2,000

Agreement management

1–3 weeks

$1,000–$3,000

Account setup

1–2 weeks

$500–$3,000

Tracking % data archiving

Ongoing

$1,000–$3,500
+ recurring costs

Analytics & cross-selling

Ongoing

$1,000–$3,500
+ recurring costs

Scheme title: Challenges in customer onboarding lifecycle
Data source:  deloitte.com — Automation in onboarding and ongoing servicing of commercial banking clients

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How to implement RPA for your bank

There are several important steps to consider before starting RPA implementation in your organization.

RPA implementation tips
Assessment

Conduct a detailed assessment, choosing the right use cases

Vendor selection

Evaluate RPA vendor’s ability to meet all your requirements

Implementation

Build a comprehensive execution framework

Choose right use cases

Selecting the right processes for RPA is one of the major prerequisites 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 use cases comes down to a company-wide assessment of all the banking 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.

Process assessment framework

Candidate processesVolume of transactionsWhat is the volume of transactions that require manual intervention?RepetitivenessWhat is the level of repetitiveness of tasks within the process?Automation abilityWhat is the level of digitization of tasks within the process?Importance of human involvementHow important is human involvement for delivering customer experience?Probability of system upgrade in the near future?Will the underlying system need upgrading soon? How likely is it?Good RPA candidate

Real-life banking RPA case studies

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 involved human employees distributing received payments for credit card debts to correct customers. Even such a simple task required a number of different checks in 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 the 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 deepened their understanding of the technology and more stakeholders bought in, the bank gradually expanded the number of use cases. As a result, in two years, RPA helped CGD to streamline over 110 processes and save around 370,000 employee hours.

Benefits of RPA in banking

According to Gartner, 80% of leaders in the financial sector are already using some form of RPA for various purposes. Here are some of the most prominent benefits of financial process automation:

Scales operations

Saves time

Minimizes IT department interference

Cuts down expenses

Facilitates compliance reporting

Increases employee efficiency

Reduces human errors

Implements seamlessly

Benefits

Regardless of the number of requests to process and tasks to complete, RPA bots' efficiency and accuracy stay the same, allowing banks to scale operations on demand.
RPA bots complete tasks much faster than humans, allowing banks to complete day-to-day tasks in shorter time frames.
After completing comprehensive training programs, employees can configure RPA bots themselves. This dramatically reduces the IT department's workload.
By minimizing human involvement in many processes, RPA implementation allows banks to cut operational costs by 30% on average.
Essentially, recorded RPA bots' actions are an audit trail, which significantly simplifies compliance reporting.
Given that RPA bots alleviate the burden of repetitive and mundane tasks from humans, employees can focus on more value-adding activities.
Unlike humans, RPA bots never get tired and perform tasks with the same accuracy regardless of their complexity, which reduces errors.
Compared to the other automation strategies, RPA causes minimal disruption to the established infrastructure and takes less time to implement.
Scales operations
Regardless of the number of requests to process and tasks to complete, RPA bots' efficiency and accuracy stay the same, allowing banks to scale operations on demand.

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Challenges of robotic process automation in banking

Despite 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 banking operations:

Challenge

Solution

Resistance to change

Regardless of the promised benefits and advantages new technology can bring to the table, resistance to change remains one of the most common hurdles that companies face. Employees get accustomed to their way of doing daily tasks and often have a hard time recognizing that a new approach is more effective.

Challenge

Solution

That is why change management is pivotal to successful RPA adoption. As soon as it becomes clear that RPA implementation is the right thing to do from a business standpoint, banks need to create comprehensive change management programs to help employees shift their mindsets and make the transition as smooth as possible.

Process standardization

In a nutshell, the more complicated the process is, the harder it becomes to adopt RPA. In the RPA implementation context, the process complexity correlates with standardization rather than the number of branches on a decision tree. When it comes to global companies with numerous complex processes, standardizing becomes difficult and resource-intensive.

Challenge

Solution

RPA adoption often calls for enterprise-wide standardization efforts across targeted processes. A positive side benefit of RPA implementation is that processes will be documented. Bots perform tasks as a string of particular steps, leaving an audit trail, which can be used to granularly analyze what the process is about. This RPA-induced documentation and data collection leads to standardization, which is the fundamental prerequisite for going fully digital.

IT support

While employees are reluctant to change because of the mindset, IT departments often have too much weight on their shoulders to support RPA implementation. In this current age of digital transformation, bank IT departments are already spending considerable resources to overcome challenges associated with cloud migration, legacy system maintenance, and implementing new ERPs.

Challenge

Solution

While RPA is much less resource-demanding than the majority of other automation solutions, the IT department's buy-in remains crucial. That is why banks need C-executives to get support from IT personnel as early as possible. In many cases, assembling a team of existing IT employees that will be dedicated solely to the RPA implementation is crucial.

RPA as the first step towards digital transformation

RPA as the first step towards digital transformation

RPA can help organizations make a step closer toward digital transformation in banking. On the one hand, RPA is a mere workaround plastered on outdated legacy systems. On the other hand, RPA is a bridge to digital transformation. Still, instead of abandoning legacy systems, you can close the gap with RPA deployment. 

With the right use case chosen and a well-thought-out configuration, RPA in the banking industry can significantly quicken 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.

RPA as the first step towards digital transformation

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