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Banking Automation: 4 Essential Tips to Transform Your Bank

“The stage is set for FS automation and AI to move from what was, only a few years ago, relatively vague concepts to bona fide, strategic business imperatives.” – Financier Worldwide Magazine

Obviously, automation is not new to banks, but technologies have matured in recent years. The emergence of artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, and blockchain have led organizations across the globe to rethink their approach. Not to mention the growing economic pressures and increased customer expectations that has put automation at the top of the transformation agenda for any bank that wishes to remain competitive.

Automation initiatives commonly aim to improve the customer experience, drive efficiency, take products to market faster and achieve or maintain regulatory compliance. To help you achieve those goals and overcome the challenges you meet along the way, this article sets out three areas Bizagi has seen to be critical to success – demonstrated through the stories of customers across the globe.

 

Tip 1 – Orchestrate everything to improve the customer experience

Your customers don’t see departments, channels, or systems. They see their bank as one organization and they expect their experience to reflect that. If not, they are increasingly happy to take their business elsewhere. That’s why enhancing customer service is the number one priority for banks, globally, according to  PWC’s Retail Banking 2020 Report. 

But developing a customer-centric business model is hard when faced with a myriad of legacy tech systems and disjointed customer data. So, what’s the solution? Old Mutual Bank took on this challenge by leveraging Bizagi as an agile orchestration layer. They wanted to achieve a 360-degree view of all customer interactions with tight integration with their legacy technology.  

For Old Mutual, this resulted in a solution managing 3000 transactions a second, reducing customer-waiting times by 10x, massively increasing cross-sell revenues, and driving consistent increases in Net Promoter Scores month-on-month.

Watch the full Old Mutual Story:

 

Tip 2 – Use RPA to accelerate manual, mundane tasks

Despite technological advances, banking employees are still burdened with manual work. Routine, repetitive tasks, like data input, not only slow down operations but can lead to errors and employee dissatisfaction. When combined with deeper orchestration from a platform like Bizagi, RPA provides a fantastic, rapid solution to reducing that mundane work and freeing employees up to complete higher-value tasks.

One of the oldest financial services firms in the US, Citizens Bank launched an RPA project to drive efficiency in their business. They have integrated RPA with their commercial lending platform, so it now performs the work of over 40 full-time employees, saving them time and money. 50% of their commercial lending platform is managed by RPA – from the onboarding of customers to the servicing and closing of the loan.  

The bank has included robots within their organizational chart to illustrate their roles and has framed pictures of all their robots that complete processes hanging on the walls and a name the robot competition for employees. It’s a fun way of personalizing the technology and making workers comfortable with the change.  

Watch the full Citizens Bank Story: 

 

Discover how Bizagi can help modernize your banking operations.

Tip 3 – Carefully manage the change with your employees

AgFirst recognized that automation acceptance requires big cultural changes, so conscientiously took steps to ensure that they walked stakeholders through the new system. “Technology was not the biggest issue… it was the cultural change,” says Bala Sivankoil, VP and Director of Application Development 

“The process we automated is the bread and butter – entering loan applications and approving them. Imagine 80% of your organization has to switch to a new way of doing things… there are going to be people who are not going to want to change. There are going to be people who are lukewarm about the change, and others who will be your ambassadors.”

Sivankoil advises that to drive change management, you should get buy-in from senior management, and make sure all employees understand the bigger picture. That means helping them to see how it will be beneficial to the business and help them personally by making life easier and driving growth. One of AgFirst’s 20 associations, a 1.2 billion dollar business, increased their loans portfolio by 40% in the first year using the new, automated loan origination process.

Watch the full AgFirst Bank: 

 

Tip 4 – Establish a Center of Excellence to repeat your success

Meaningful organizational change is not driven by the automation of just one process or department, although that is often where the project starts. True success is defined by an organization’s ability to repeat successes across the business.

Bancolombia is a fantastic example of this, with 1800+ processes automated, in use by 20,000+ employees and touching 10 million+ customers. Bancolombia’s objective was to develop a virtual workforce, combining human, robotic, cognitive, and analytic capacities in order to provide a superior customer experience.

To ensure that they stay on-track to meeting this objective and maintain a high-quality standard, they created a Center of Excellence. This CoE has helped the bank to launch over 1,800 processes in the last 10 years. Bancolombia now has over 300 functioning bots in the business, supporting 140 processes, saving employees over 18 million minutes of work a year. The deployment of RPA and RDA has significantly improved the customer experience, with 639 branches using automation. This has increased the efficiency of service time by 59% and freed over 515,000 hours in-branch per year – an impressive result.  

Watch the full Bancolombia Story: