October 16, 2023
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
Now let’s figure out some of the most potent RPA in banking use cases:
There are several important steps to consider before starting RPA implementation in your organization.
Conduct a detailed assessment, choosing the right use cases
Evaluate RPA vendor’s ability to meet all your requirements
Build a comprehensive execution framework
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
