Financial services are unlike any other sector when it comes to the implementation of automation technology. It is turning to intelligent automation to resolve long-standing problems such as bridging the information gap between legacy systems, meeting constant demands for audibility, security, data quality and more.
ABP consultancy has been supporting its clients in the financial services sector in their automation journey and has helped them “prove the value of the automation technology in use”. We would like to share some examples of how our financial services clients are leveraging the power of automation through this blog.
Achieving regulatory compliance
Financial services is a highly regulated industry, and internal teams are required to continually check and validate information for compliance to regulations around KYC (Know your customer), AML(Anti-money laundering). Global banks spend billions on ensuring compliance as the fines for non-compliance would hurt them financially and destroy their reputation, costing them even more in lost business.
How does intelligent automation help compliance in Financial Services?
Integrated process automation solutions can ensure consistent application and governance of regulatory standards across the enterprise. It can help collect, classify and consolidate information from internal and external systems. Using automation technologies and data capture solutions enables data to be collected from any source, paper or digital. As a result, financial firms can reduce time and resources spent on data collection, entry, validation, tracking and reporting tasks that are repetitive and manual. It also gives the firms the flexibility to adapt to any changes in regulations.
Reconciliation and Reporting
Some of our clients use intelligent automation for more specific use cases like reconciliation. By nature reconciliation is tedious task involving tying in numbers from various systems and often excels sheets.
How intelligent automation can help in reconciliation and reporting?
We have helped our clients build reconciliations by automating data extraction and loading in transactions to reconcile revenue and balance sheet data. Intelligent automation allows managers to automatically find the reconciling items, identify why they are reconciling, pull together documentation justifying those reconciling items, and post entries for review by human analysts. It also helps detect anomalies in the data early enough that reconciliations aren’t even necessary.
All the information is made available to managers and directors in dashboards, where they can get insights from financial data that they can trust to be accurate.
Single view of the customer
Intelligent automation can be used to bring together all customers records, so the customer journey is clear. These records are the “single version of the truth” for all client information and help customer service teams deliver exceptional customer service or deal with problems at the point of contact. It also empowers customer teams to take immediate actions and react to customer needs instantaneously. As a result, customers are more satisfied and loyal.
Accelerate business growth
Financial services firms are highly competitive and have complex operations, making it hard for them to grow. Intelligent automation technologies help banks operate efficiently with lesser resources, clearing up time and resources to be invested in growth. Some of the digital-first banks today have replicated robust banking infrastructures using intelligent automation technologies to their advantage. For them accelerating business growth does not always equal to the hefty investment in resources as the technology becomes the enabler to scale. Accelerating business growth through removing manual repeptitive tasks, creating capacity for colleagues to focus on higher value activities. Removing the need for additional headcount/temporary workers and utilising the existing knowledge of the core team.
However, the latest PWC financial services automation survey suggests that fewer than 20% of the respondents have achieved enterprise-wide scale. Leading firms have used various approaches to realise the true value of automation, and a new approach often referred to as “citizen-led” automation is evolving fast. ABP believes this approach could be the key to automation success at scale. Hence, we have invested heavily in our citizen-led training courses where we train some of our client's workforce to be power users of the technology to create bots to automate their tasks. This way, financial firms can maximise the potential of intelligent automation across the organisation in a short time.