Introduction

The business scenarios are continuously changing, and in these changing scenarios, the financial industry is under great pressure to cut costs and provide enhanced services to the customer while maintaining their competitive edge. Today, customers demand easy and quick access to services, great personalization and value for money. It is the prior responsibility of financial institutions to meet these requirements while maintaining their costs. And for this we have Robotic Process Automation (RPA) which helps to achieve this.

Robotic Process Automation involves bots that are deployed to mimic the day-to-day routine tasks which are performed using some business rule and can be easily automated. A large number of financial institutions have been opting for RPA to fulfill the demands of customers.

RPA automates:

• Filling out forms
• Extracting and merging data
• Formatting data
• Copying and pasting data
• Reading and writing database

RPA helps financial institutions provide 24/7 support to customers for some important activities and processes. 

RPA drives the Financial Services to automate processes

We know that banks, financial institutions, and insurance companies are the most eminent users of the processes automated by RPA. Banks and financial institutions aim to continuously evolve firstly to provide better customer satisfaction and survive the competition posed by virtual banking solutions. They are under immense pressure to boost their efficiency and optimize their resources which have resulted in opting for automation of their processes.

Banks and financial services can use RPA for two main activities: 

• To install end-user device software bots 
• To build an AI workforce

RPA serves as an essential tool to address the demands of the finance sector and increase their efficiency by reducing their costs with the services-through-software model. To seize the opportunity rising in their industry, they should follow a strategic approach. 

RPA in financial services focuses on routine administrative kind of work, such as copying data from email to the system. Financial Services RPA functions at the presentation layer; such as scraping data associated with multiple, simple tasks that occupy a large part of the day. 

The exponential growth of RPA can be estimated by the fact that the finance industry is going to be worth $2.9billion by 2022, which is a massive increase from $250 million in 2016, as per a recent report.

How RPA is changing the Financial and Banking Industry? 

Here is a list of various tasks that are being automated in the financial services sector:

1. Automatic Report Generation: A regular requirement of a bank is to generate compliance reports of fraudulent activities in the form of suspicious activity report or SAR which have to be checked by the compliance officers and read manually and fill in the details in the SAR which is an extremely cumbersome task and takes a lot of time. But, if we implement RPA with natural language generation capability, this entire process can be quickly completed in record time where it can read through the process and extract the required information for filling in SAR which leads to a reduction in operational cost and also saves time. 
2. Customer Onboarding: Customer onboarding is a long and tedious process primarily because many documents are required for manual verification. This whole process can easily be automated by using RPA tools to extract the data from KYC using OCR, which can then be matched with the data provided by the customer. If no discrepancies are encountered, then it can automatically enter the data into the customer management portal. This not only removes the chances of error but also saves time and effort put in by the employees. 
3. KYC and Anti-money Laundering: Both these processes are very data-intensive, which makes them suitable for RPA, ranging from activities of catching suspicious banking transactions or automating manual processes. We can quickly implement RPA, which saves both time and cost as compared to the traditional solutions provided. 
4. Account Opening: By implementation of RPA, the process of account opening has become much more straightforward, quick and accurate. Automation directly eliminates errors that may exist between the core banking system and new account opening requests, thus enhancing the data quality of the system.
5. Mortgage Lending: The process of mortgage lending is extremely time consuming and thus making it a perfect choice for automation. It allows for automation of various tasks that are crucial in the mortgage lending process including loan initiation, document processing, quality control etc. This helps in faster completion of the process leading to enhanced customer satisfaction. Another benefit of this is that it unburdens the employees from doing manual tasks, thus helping them to focus on essential tasks. 
6. Loan Processing: Loan Processing has always been considered a very tedious process, even though banks have automated it to some extent, but further automation will bring down the processing to a record 10-15 minute process. This will lead to increased customer satisfaction and reduced workload on employees.
7. Customer Service: There is a large volume of common customer queries making it difficult for the staff to respond to them with low turnaround time. RPA tools allow them to automate such mundane rule-based tasks to effectively respond to queries in real-time, thereby reducing the turnaround time.
8. Credit Card Processing: Credit card processing is one of the most cumbersome and tedious processes due to its extensive validation checks. But by implementing RPA, we can make a quick decision to either approve or disapprove applications with a rule-based approach.
9. Account Closure Process: There is an enormous amount of account closing requests monthly which the bank has to deal with primarily due to the non-compliance on the part of the customers. RPA can help in solving this by easily tracking all such customers and sending them automatically generated notification and reminder for submission of required documents

Perks of RPA in Banking and Financial Services

1. Accelerates customer onboarding 
2. Increases revenue and cash flow
3. Reduces operational costs
4. Automates manual process 
5. Reduces human interventions enhancing process efficiency 
6. Decreases customer loss
7. Provides enhanced customer experience
8. Reduces churn
9. Improves customer satisfaction quotient
10. Engenders customer loyalty and trust
11. Enhances data quality
12. Ensures KYC regulations are met 
13. Stabilizes industry best practices

Risks Associated with RPA in Banking & Finance

All the process change and new technology come with their share of risks, which may affect the functionality of the organization. Yet compared to long-term core technology implementation, the risk of RPA is far low. This is because robots can be turned off and just affects the individual user’s desktop setting. There are few risks associated with it, these are:

1. Operational risk: The internal staff might be worried about losing their jobs to the robots with the increase in the processes which are being automated by RPA, which is not the case. Robots are the tools that help the employees to reduce the tasks they struggle with daily, thus improving their productivity in working towards core business activities.
2. Compliance risk: While RPA is user friendly, its scope and inventory management is not at all easy. Thus, it requires full proof audit trials to ensure that there is no discrepancy in the work allotted and the job is done.
3. Data-quality risk: The quality of data might also suffer because of RPA because there need to be standards in the way that data is presented. Thus, there is a risk to the quality of data and needs to be coordinated between the ways information is presented. 
4. Ethical risk: Enterprises need to balance their investments between people and technology, just outsourcing or replacing the staff can negatively impact the morale of the employees. But, RPA allows enterprises to utilize the best of both worlds that is an optimum combination of humans and technology.

Conclusion

RPA has already gathered a huge customer base for all the businesses that are looking for reduced cost and increased efficiency. It seeks to develop human resources in a way that the efforts put in are minimum while the benefits that are reaped are maximum. RPA is a technology that has the potential to transform the sphere of financial services. Additionally, it offers opportunities to accelerate the business process by automating them. Also, it allows the employees to free themselves from time-consuming manual work. By deploying RPA, enterprises can easily streamline their functions like accounting; it can efficiently assemble and consolidate data. It can also significantly reduce the expenses from different branches, create an outstanding customer experience by offering 24/7 support and can also help in lowering cyber fraud.

Thus, RPA is indeed poised to take the world of financial services by storm, as evidenced by its rapid growth. The benefits for the enterprises that move quickly are significant. Thus, it’s crucial to formulate a thoughtful strategy and get started soon.