If there’s one heavily regulated industry, it’s finance and banking. The regulations are here for a good reason: to make sure that the flow of money is safe and effective. However, the need to follow these rules means that laissez-faire is not an option; instead, all tasks must be strictly defined and formulated into clear-cut processes.
And where there are processes, there are automation opportunities.
The banking industry is starting to recognize the potential automation holds: according to Gartner, 80% of finance leaders are planning to implement RPA (Robotic Process Automation) or have already done that. Should you do the same?
In this article, we’ll help you find the answer. We’ll discuss the most pressing challenges the finance sector is facing, cover the processes you can automate, and see what RPA for banking can give your business. As a bonus, we’ve thrown in a couple of RPA success stories from the banking industry.
Learn more about using RPA in other industries, like insurance, logistics, real estate, or automation for consultancy.
Banking and finance — current challenges
The first step to understanding the benefits of RPA for finance is to take a look at the main pain points in the industry.
Unstructured data
Documents and records used in banking workflows are diverse and come both in a digital and paper format. Credit reports, emails, contracts, trade agreements, KYC documentation, forms… Verifying and extracting data from these documents takes a lot of time which could be spent on other tasks.
Multiple application layers and legacy software
Implementing automation
This one may seem to go against the point of this article but let’s be honest: despite their high adoption rate and unquestionable usefulness of automated solutions, implementing most of them isn’t easy. And it gets even more difficult if you try to deploy a diverse range of attended, unattended, and hybrid models.
Customer experience
Customer service, onboarding, and advising are crucial but time-consuming. Even though some stages of these workflows are simple and tedious, they are still usually performed by highly trained financial experts. Taking this burden off their shoulders would allow these professionals to put their time and skills to better use.
Regulatory compliance
Failing to comply with regulations such as CECL, SOC2, or SEC carries the risk of severe financial penalties. On average, organizations lose $4 million in a single non-compliance event. Even worse, such an event compromises your company’s reputation—and in banking, trust is everything.
Data security
Seeing how customer data is particularly sensitive in banking, its safety shouldn’t rely on human intuition or manual processes. In reality, it often does, which makes breaches and fraud more likely due to simple human errors.
Recruitment and staff retention
With society-wide phenomena such as quiet quitting or great resignation, finding qualified hires becomes a true challenge. It also means that retaining valued employees is even more important than before.
Operational inefficiencies
As we’ve mentioned above, many processes