Industry Specifics: RPA and Banking

Banks have really stepped up in the past decade to deliver front-end automation for their clients. Most of us can check our accounts online, set up automatic bill paying, and even deposit checks by snapping a photo with our smartphone. As fantastic as those services are, there are more back office processes that can be given the robotic process automation (RPA) treatment.

Banking is an incredibly competitive market. You’ve got to be on top of your game at all times, and at this point, banks are desperate to find any area that can be slimmed down. Similar to other industries, banking is largely built on documents and the numerous legacy systems used to organize them. There’s paper involved when a new customer applies for enrollment, when a customer is seeking a loan, and a myriad of other, more complicated procedures. Even if these applications are now online, supplemental documents and pieces of information aren’t always digital. 

Unlike other forms of automation, RPA can work across different legacy systems to retrieve information. Company mergers and acquisitions are common in the banking world, which means that disparate legacy systems have been smashed together and made to work. With RPA on the job, banks can greatly reduce human involvement with their many databases, thereby eliminating the need for so many database administrators.

With so many documents and databases involved, processing time can be slow and prone to error: a process waits for approval for days or documents are misfiled. By automating some of these back office tasks, you’ll know where information is at all times and be able to pull it up at will thanks to RPA robots. On top of that, implementing RPA will make these processes totally transparent. Data is recorded for every transaction and can be viewed for later review.

Like the insurance industry, banks must constantly check information against regulations and compliance guidelines, which can change overnight. RPA processes can be altered just as quickly, keeping the organization up to speed and in line with regulations.

It's important for every organization (but especially banking institutions) to analyze business processes before jumping into RPA. It’s not worth your time to automate an inefficient workflow. Divide your processes into ones that can be fully automated, partially automated, or require human handling. Remember that even if a process cannot be fully automated, even partial automation can save substantial time and money.

Find out today how RPA provider UiPath could revolutionize your business processes.