5 Ways Banks are Using RPA Today

RPA can automate multiple business functions in a banking organization. This frees up time for your employees to focus on high-level tasks and directly contributing to company revenue.

Robotic process automation (RPA), the latest emerging technology that is quickly gaining popularity in the financial industry. Research says that 70%-80% of the rules-based processes can be automated using software robots, it also states that RPA is going to be the digital workforce of the future. Robotic process automation enhances and emulates the work of a human and removes the inefficiencies in data processing and repetitive tasks. Let’s see more about RPA and the five ways how RPA improvises the banking system.

So how does RPA work?

RPA applies automation to transactional rules-based tasks where structured data, clear pre-defined rules, and primitives are presently or can be used. The average turn around time of the manual backend process is improved and human errors are eliminated using RPA.

How does RPA operate in banking?

To deliver a unique experience and stand tall among this highly competitive business world, banks are adapting to the best fin-tech that is available. RPA has already started creating impacts in the financial market with its numerous benefits.

RPA automates the labor-intensive and monotonous tasks effectively. Accuracy and high speed are the significant benefits of RPA. This saves a lot of time for the workers which they can save it to perform other high-value tasks in the organization.

For example, employees can interact and increase customer engagement and make customer services better rather than spending time on routine data operations like feeding data or copy pasting. This makes RPA suitable for several applications in banking organizations.

RPA also helps in delivering consistent service to keep up with customer expectations. RPA with artificial intelligence improves, streamlines the business process and relatively decrease the expenditure.

Once the automation software is installed, RPA takes over the work of man, keyboard and mouse. It automatically does the basic operations like clicking, opening folders, retrieving data, copying, pasting data from one banking system to another.

RPA helps with data collection. It automatically sends e-mails or message requesting for data that is missing which is required for processing. So this is what RPA does on the basic level.

Say bye to long hours of data entry

As data accumulation in organizations is escalating, RPA helps in handling it. RPA integrated with the data entry methodology enhances the manual data entry process. The process is similar to macros in Excel but here RPA can be automated to numerous tasks in a more effective and productive way.

RPA simplifies a highly complex data entry process and produces desired outcomes with accuracy. Here is a list of benefits by applying RPA to data entry operations,

• Reduce the headcounts involved in the data entry process.
• Faster and lessens cost
• Automates data re-keying
• Promotes the quality and accuracy of the processes that are involved with data
• RPA can be applied to data enrichment, data cleansing, data mining, data de-duplication, and data extraction
• Enhancing the workflow and augmenting the human personals ability
• Reduced waiting time for a service and increased service quality

Provide uninterrupted customer service 24/7

You can use RPA in two ways to provide uninterrupted customer service.

One is, you can use RPA for implementing customer support by consistently reaching out to customer queries, providing guidelines, online assistance, and more.

The other one is automating bank employees work and thereby making them available to customers during important meetings and discussions when they face any complex issue. In such situations, customers seek human help in understanding their emotions.

Analyzing the issue, understanding and solving it requires honed skills which come with practice and it can be done only with human interaction. These are the greatest opportunities you can use it to uplift the bottom line of your organization.

RPA when properly programmed will increase the immediacy in attending customers and operate according to their demands without errors. RPA can also be used to follow up customers, automatically send important messages and alert your customers about the new services provided.

Overall RPA in customer service is making software robots address the low priority queries and humans to address the high priority queries thus ensuring the availability of customer service 24/7 so that customers can reach out anytime.

Implement effective anti-money laundering algorithms with RPA :

As anti-money laundering landscape keeps evolving and getting more complex, financial institutions are facing huge demand for resources to take care and monitor operations like AML customer screening, transfer monitoring, KYC, validation, and so on.

Financial institutions invest an average of 60$-500$ million dollars once a year to comply with regulatory compliance. If this can be avoided or reduced, banks will spare an enormous amount of money.

Another major drawback of changing AML landscape is, banks are facing risks of losing reputation and money if they don’t keep up with the AML regulatory demands. Some banks have even paid over 300$ as fine due to improper regulatory compliance.

Effective implementation of RPA can rectify these drawbacks and simplify operational processing. RPA benefits FI’s with cost reduction and increases the job satisfaction of bank employees by automating their difficult monotonous tasks.

As RPA is capable of analyzing huge volumes of data, AML operations such as Customer Due Diligence (CDD), client screening, transaction monitoring and client offboarding can be done with higher effectiveness. Choosing the right process to automate, effective monitoring and proper governance will make RPA beef up anti-money laundering.

Quick and enhanced credit card processing

Everyone at least once in a lifetime would have experienced a delay in receiving credit cards. It is because of the long hours taken for collecting required documents of the customer, doing the background check, validating the details and deciding whether the customer is eligible to receive the credit card or not.

This led to customer dissatisfaction, cancellation of the request and customer churn. Well, RPA provides a solution to these problems and helps in speeding up the process of validating and dispatching credit cards. RPA easily integrates with the existing system and increases the performance.

It automates data manipulation, triggers responses, process standardization, increases the effectiveness of managing repetitive tasks and communicates across different channels just like humans.

RPA reduces one hour work to just 5 minutes. RPA enables you to process the application, validate and approve or disapprove the application within hours. Thus you can enhance the service, increase customer retention and improve your market.

Combating fraud using RPA

The major threat that needs to be managed in banks is fraud data and fraud transaction. RPA can track and check all transactions. RPA can go through huge volumes of databases, detect and send reports in case of any fraud transaction. When RPA comes across suspicious or fraud activity, it sends a report to the human fraud prevention analyst.

Manually detecting frauds is a tedious process and requires a lot of time and effort, whereas RPA can do it accurately with less human interaction and reduced response time. Controlling fraud will help banks easily meet regulatory compliance and reduce the other major risks faced by banks.

All together, analyzing and finding out the right processes that require automation in your organization is crucial. Proper implementation of RPA and taking into account the preventive measures for the pitfalls will assist you to level up in the market.