Why financial services need automated processes

Growing pressure for profit, skilled labor shortages, and competition from the fintech industry have combined to put immense pressure on financial services and banking institutions. Now, maximizing efficiency and reducing costs isn’t just a goal — it’s mandatory for organizations to thrive. Robotic process automation (RPA) has transformed the way these organizations get work done, but a new generation of intelligent process automation solutions are taking these benefits even further. 

In the past, projects involving customer onboarding, reporting, loan processing, opening accounts, and other basic functions, were incredibly cumbersome and labor intensive. When know your customers (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) compliance processes became more intense after 9/11, these challenges became even worse. RPA allowed banks to hand over the most time-consuming tasks to an unseen “digital workforce,” that completes processes more quickly and with greater accuracy, without incurring additional labor expenses or losing motivation.

This has set the financial services industry on a completely new trajectory. McKinsey found that RPAs can “fully automate” about 42% of finance activities, and “mostly automate” an additional 19% of tasks. Now, most companies in the financial services sector are automating half of their business processes, leading to massive savings. In fact, Everest Group found that the top implementers of RPA have earned nearly 4x on their investments. 

RPA is no longer enough

Unfortunately, RPA still leaves a lot of grueling work to be done manually, especially in terms of document processing. While RPAs can automate tasks like approvals or routing, a lot of the initial capture and data extraction must still be done manually, requiring human workers to get data properly formatted for the RPA to actually process. This can be a huge drain on time and other resources, and bog workers down from doing more important, revenue-driving tasks. 

Projects involving customer support, responding to emails, approving applications, and organizing paperwork can slow to a crawl. This can have a major impact on customer satisfaction — especially as front end processes become easier and faster thanks to the proliferation of responsive fintech apps. 

How intelligent process automation closes the gaps

Fortunately, next wave automation platforms like Automation Hero are emerging to streamline data extraction. After RPA, software engineers began developing intelligent document processing (IDP) platforms that could automate input processes. These systems use optical character recognition (OCR) to “read” virtually every kind of document (including images), extract data, and format it for processing by users or RPAs.

Automation Hero is versatile enough to extract data from virtually any kind of document, including PDFs, emails, Word documents, scanned contracts, digital forms, and beyond. This lends the platform a number of incredible use cases, including:

• Detecting the intent of emails to quickly route customer requests and pull relevant data.
• Approving transactions more efficiently by eliminating manual processing. 
• Processing ​​GDPR Subject Access Requests with ultra-fast AI data validation.
• Classifying documents automatically with intelligent character recognition. 
• Finding cross-selling and upselling opportunities for products such as mortgages and home insurance. 

Beyond providing these IDP capabilities, Automation Hero serves as a complete end-to-end solution that can act upon the data it extracts from documents for further processing and routing. In fact, Automation Hero’s advanced, deep learning AI can complete the entire document cycle and learn to improve its own performance over time. 

Most importantly, none of this comes at the expense of an organization’s existing systems. As an intelligent process automation solution, the platform can integrate seamlessly with another RPA to fill in performance gaps until customers have the time and resources to transition out of it. Once ready, Automation Hero can work as an entire enterprise AI system with even more capabilities than other solutions. 

Automating processes in the financial services industry can be incredibly challenging, with so much red tape and compliance to navigate, but Automation Hero meets customers exactly where they are for a frictionless process.