How Do Banks Use Automation: Benefits, Challenges, & Solutions in 2024

While generative AI (GenAI) stands poised to improve everything from risk management to profit margins, the banking world has been understandably hesitant to adopt the technology in light of ongoing regulatory changes and perspectives. Banking organizations are constantly competing not just for customers but for highly skilled individuals to fill their job vacancies. Automating repetitive tasks reduces employee workload and allows them to spend their working hours performing higher-value tasks that benefit the bank and increase their levels of job satisfaction. Award-winning global asset management company, Insight Investment optimized transparency around its end-to-end business processes by visualizing the data stored in Bizagi applications, facilitating process management and further process improvement.

Other banks have trained developers but have been unable to move solutions into production. Still more have begun the automation process only to find they lack the capabilities required to move the work forward, much less transform the bank in any comprehensive fashion. Customers are interacting with banks using multiple channels which increases the data sources for banks.

With RPA and automation, faster trade processing – paired with higher bookings accuracy – allows analysts to devote more attention to clients and markets. Traders, advisors, and analysts rely on UiPath to supercharge their productivity and be the best at what they do. Address resource constraints by letting automation handle time-demanding operations, connect fragmented tech, and reduce friction across the trade lifecycle. Discover smarter self-service customer journeys, and equip contact center agents with data that dramatically lowers average handling times. With UiPath, SMTB built over 500 workflow automations to streamline operations across the enterprise. Learn how SMTB is bringing a new perspective and approach to operations with automation at the center.

Risk management for gen AI remains in the early stages for financial institutions—we have seen little consistency in how most are approaching the issue. Sooner rather than later, however, banks will need to redesign their risk- and model-governance frameworks and develop new sets of controls. But identifying the gaps is important to tackle the deficiency in the next iteration.

Without a centralized data backbone, it is practically impossible to analyze the relevant data and generate an intelligent recommendation or offer at the right moment. Lastly, for various analytics and advanced-AI models to scale, organizations need a robust set of tools and standardized processes to build, test, deploy, and monitor models, in a repeatable and “industrial” way. In today’s fast-paced financial world, ‘high efficiency’ is not just a goal; it’s the standard for success. To that end, technologies like AI chatbots and conversational AI are emerging as game-changers. They not only streamline customer service but also allow human employees to focus on more complex tasks, significantly enhancing overall operational efficiency.

Proper management of accounts receivables is of utmost importance because it is directly related to cash flow. Bank employees spend much time tracking payments and filling in information within disparate systems. Each department in the banking and finance institutions has automation in banking sector its records of transaction journals. Additionally, compliance officers spend almost 15% of their time tracking changes in regulatory requirements. RPA solutions are also instrumental in speeding up the application processing times and increasing customer satisfaction.

Traversing this path won’t be easy but the sooner the banking industry begins this journey, the better it will be for everyone, even those whose jobs maybe most impacted by automation. Banks can do more with less human resources and rip the financial benefits with RPA. A survey in the financial section by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that 30% of the respondents were not only experimenting with RPA but were on the way to adopting it enterprise-wide.

To do this, leadership must document and communicate any existing or foreseen risks when using AI with key stakeholders. From there, departmental contributors can help conduct security assessments and determine data usage and privacy compliance. Many regional and community financial institutions have been hesitant to embrace GenAI due to well-known errors that have been documented in the early days of the technology. Hyperautomation can also help banks to comply with complex regulations and standards, such as anti-money laundering and KYC regulations. Automated systems can process large amounts of data quickly and accurately, enabling banks to identify and report suspicious activity more efficiently. This can help banks to stay compliant with regulatory requirements and reduce the risk of financial penalties.

Operations

Cross-functional teams bring coherence and transparency to implementation, by putting product teams closer to businesses and ensuring that use cases meet specific business outcomes. Processes such as funding, staffing, procurement, and risk management get rewired to facilitate speed, scale, and flexibility. While smartphones took many years to move banking to a more digital destination—consider that mobile banking only recently overtook the web as the primary customer engagement channel in the United States6Based on Finalta by McKinsey analysis, 2023.

• Enterprise platforms deliver specialized capabilities and/or shared services to establish standardization throughout the organization in areas such as collections, payment utilities, human resources, and finance.
• To begin, banks should consider hiring a compliance partner to assist them in complying with federal and state regulations.
• Intelligent automation not only delivers significant cost savings to companies but also relieves them of the time spent manually moving, collecting and posting data between different systems.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Banking automation behind the scenes has improved anti-money laundering efforts while freeing staff to spend more time attracting new business. The banking industry has particularly embraced low-code and no-code technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and document AI (Artificial Intelligence). These technologies require little investment, are adopted with minimal disruption, require no human intervention once deployed, and are beneficial throughout the organization from the C-suite to customer service. And with technology fundamentally changing the financial and consumer ecosystems, there has never been a better time to take the next step in digital acceleration.

The result has been a cautious approach to both AI and ML, with the majority of implementations focusing on non-customer-facing applications. This limited usage, compounded by the lack of regulation around AI, leaves new legal questions mounting while regulators work to sort matters out. Leaders must acquire a deep personal understanding of gen AI, if they haven’t already. Investments in executive education will equip them to show employees precisely how the technology and the bank’s operations connect, thereby generating excitement and overcoming trepidation. To deal with increasing pressure to empower tech-savvy consumers, banks need to step up their automation game.

This includes implementing encryption and access controls and adhering to relevant data protection regulations. Implementing marketing automation in the banking sector comes with its own set of challenges and considerations. While marketing automation offers significant benefits, banks must be aware of the potential obstacles and address them effectively. With a vision of ‘Leading the Future of Banking’, UnionBank wanted to leverage technology to provide an omni-channel banking experience for its customers. They were looking to elevate customer experiences by eliminating long wait times to reach customer support over calls by deploying an AI chatbot on two channels (Website and Facebook Messenger).

Few technologies have moved from theoretical potential to game-changing impact as quickly as generative AI. One large private bank reduced the process of initiating a loan from a typical 60 minutes to less than 10 minutes by using Newgen’s platform. It has also dramatically sped up the underwriting process, from 100 minutes to 30 minutes, and it used end-to-end automation to reduce the time of closures of loans to under a day. Business and technology leaders in banks and FIs have had their eyes on these digital transformation priorities. However, a robust strategy around reliable, all-encompassing solutions is often elusive.

Benefits of marketing automation in the banking industry

Additionally, banks will need to augment homegrown AI models, with fast-evolving capabilities (e.g., natural-language processing, computer-vision techniques, AI agents and bots, augmented or virtual reality) in their core business processes. Many of these leading-edge capabilities have the potential to bring a paradigm shift in customer experience and/or operational efficiency. Being an automation solution provider for multiple industries, AutomationEdge has scaled multiple banking and financial services providers in accelerating their business process efficiency and workplace experience. For example- one of our clients HDFC bank had been facing huge challenges in process inconsistency and a high rate of errors that were leading to lower revenue and higher operational costs. To process a single loan application through HDFC bank processing time was 40 minutes.

The goal of hyperautomation is to automate as much work as possible to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and eliminate manual errors. With this in mind, some everyday use cases for hyperautomation in the banking sector include automating customer service automating financial processes. Autonom8’s hyperautomation platform can potentially benefit the banking sector, including cost reduction, improved customer experiences, enhanced accuracy, and compliance with regulatory requirements. Hyperautomation in banking can take many forms, from automating simple tasks like data entry and reconciliation to more complex processes such as risk management and compliance. In all cases, the goal is to reduce the time and resources required to complete tasks, freeing staff to focus on more strategic and value-adding activities.

Customer engagement and retention

This is not to suggest that as computers become more intelligent, they may not able to perform the more abstract tasks that still require humans. In my view, we will ultimately get to that world, although probably at a slower pace than most people expect. But as machines become more dominant, further product innovations and changes to competitive market structure will lead to new and more complex tasks that will still require human effort. Get in touch with us to know how to transition your business to be at par with the world’s best with state of the art banking automation solutions. The phased approach to automation we have covered is ideal for banks of all sizes to hop into the digital bandwagon. They need to keep in mind that this exercise involves multiple and multi-level compliance, synchronization and management responsibilities.

If would like to learn more about how automation can accelerate your bank’s transformation efforts, download our free ebook, The Essential Guide to Modernizing Banking Operations. Interestingly, as ATMs expanded—from 100,000 in 1990 to about 400,000 or so until recently—the number of tellers employed by banks did not fall, contrary to what one might have expected. According to the research by James Bessen of Boston University School of Law, there are two reasons for this counterintuitive result. Banking automation helps devise customized, reliable workflows to satisfy regulatory needs. Automation may be implemented in a big wide variety of enterprise system automation projects, there are numerous well-described use instances in this space.

Customer Service

Keeping daily records of business transactions and profit and loss allows you to plan ahead of time and detect problems early. You can avoid losses by being proactive in controlling and dealing with these challenges. With the use of financial automation, ensuring that expense records are compliant with company regulations and preparing expense reports becomes easier. By automating the reimbursement process, it is possible to manage payments on a timely basis. With the use of automatic warnings, policy infractions and data discrepancies can be communicated to the appropriate individuals/departments. To put it another way, an organization with many roles and sub-companies maintains its finances using various structures and processes.

• Banking business automation can help banks become more flexible, allowing them to respond quickly to changing banking conditions both within and beyond the country.
• This includes implementing encryption and access controls and adhering to relevant data protection regulations.
• The central team, on the other hand, is having trouble reconciling the accounts of all the departments and sub-companies.
• To compete successfully and thrive, incumbent banks must become “AI-first” institutions, adopting AI technologies as the foundation for new value propositions and distinctive customer experiences.

Marketing automation in the banking sector refers to using software and technologies to automate and streamline marketing processes, tasks, and campaigns. It empowers banks to leverage data-driven insights, automate repetitive tasks, and deliver personalized experiences at scale. Customer onboarding in banking has taken a leap forward with AI-powered automation and chatbots. These technologies effortlessly handle the complex web of regulatory compliance and personal data verification, transforming a cumbersome process into a streamlined and efficient experience.

A wonderful instance of that is worldwide banks’ use of robots in their account commencing procedure to extract data from entering bureaucracy and ultimately feed it into distinct host applications. Every bank and credit union has its very own branded mobile application; however, just because a company has a mobile banking philosophy doesn’t imply it’s being used to its full potential. To keep clients delighted, a bank’s mobile experience must be quick, easy to use, fully featured, secure, and routinely updated.

The journey to becoming an AI-first bank entails transforming capabilities across all four layers of the capability stack. Ignoring challenges or underinvesting in any layer will ripple through all, resulting in a sub-optimal stack that is incapable of delivering enterprise goals. Discover how leaders from Wells Fargo, TD Bank, JP Morgan, and Arvest transformed their organizations with automation and AI.

The CFPB followed this up in September 2023 with guidance specific to credit denials, noting legal requirements for lenders around the use of AI and providing specific, accurate reasons for credit denials. Applying business logic to analyze data and make decisions removes simpler decisions from employee workflows. Plus, RPA bots can perform tasks previously undertaken by employees at a faster rate and without the need for breaks.

Again, the unstructured nature of much of the data and the size of the data sets add complexity to pinpointing quality issues. Leading banks are using a combination of human talent and automation, intervening at multiple points in the data life cycle to ensure quality of all data. Data leaders also must consider the implications of security risks with the new technology—and be prepared to move quickly in response to regulations. Management teams with early success in scaling gen AI have started with a strategic view of where gen AI, AI, and advanced analytics more broadly could play a role in their business. This view can cover everything from highly transformative business model changes to more tactical economic improvements based on niche productivity initiatives.

To accomplish this will require not only execution excellence but also a culture of innovation, a core value of which will be curiosity. The language of the paper have benefited from the academic editing services supplied by Eric Francis to improve the grammar and readability. The following paragraphs explore some of the changes banks will need to undertake in each layer of this capability stack. In today’s banks, the value of automation might be the only thing that isn’t transitory.

Risk and Compliance Reporting

Gen AI certainly has the potential to create significant value for banks and other financial institutions by improving their productivity. But scaling up is always hard, and it’s still unclear how effectively banks will bring gen AI solutions to market and persuade employees and customers to fully embrace them. Only by following a plan that engages all of the relevant hurdles, complications, and opportunities will banks tap the enormous promise of gen AI long into the future. Today, many of these same organizations have leveraged their newfound abilities to offer financial literacy, economic education, and fiscal well-being. These new banking processes often include budgeting applications that assist the public with savings, investment software, and retirement information.

Its primary focus is on real-time analysis of diverse offline and online events and data sources. The Latinia NBA (Next Best Action) Real-time Decision Engine is a powerful tool designed to boost sales, deliver value, and cultivate customer loyalty. It achieves this by leveraging transaction information, customer intelligence data, and advanced business rules. RPA bots make it easy to automate tasks, which helps drive efficiency in regular business practices. In certain cases, bots can replace human workers entirely, which allows the bank to redeploy its workers into other areas. In some scenarios, roles that already exist could be supported by robotics, which assists in expediting timelines, reducing human errors, and improving productivity.

This cuts down the risk, time, and cost of welcoming new customers and sets a new standard in user-friendly banking services, ensuring a smooth and fast onboarding journey. In today’s fast-paced financial scene, ever wondered why banks and financial institutions are all focusing on banking automation? With technologies like machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), conversational AI and generative AI, BFSI companies are able to automate intricate tasks, interpret human language, recognize emotions, and adapt to real-time updates. One of the most significant benefits of hyperautomation in banking is cost reduction. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, banks can reduce their reliance on manual labor and minimize the risk of human error. ”, on average, retail banks have between 300 and 800 procedures, which can be simplified using business process management solutions that eliminate human error and inefficiencies that negatively affect the client experience.

Too often, banking leaders call for new operating models to support new technologies. Successful institutions’ models already enable flexibility and scalability to support new capabilities. An operating model that is fit for scale-up is cross-functional and aligns accountabilities and responsibilities between delivery and business teams.

This includes steps for overseeing and testing programs prior to launch as well as monitoring for compliance. A complete enterprise risk management program should include a thorough assessment and documentation of all third-party and vendor risks. These programs also require ongoing oversight with accountability to executive management and boards of directors to ensure everyone is well informed of the current risks and the evolving regulatory landscape. This can help organizations remain agile and able to transition as compliance and regulations advance. These statements and orders only scratch the surface of the regulations financial institutions must consider when implementing AI solutions.

While analytics at banks have been relatively focused, and often governed centrally, gen AI has revealed that data and analytics will need to enable every step in the value chain to a much greater extent. Business leaders will have to interact more deeply with analytics colleagues and synchronize often-differing priorities. In our experience, this transition is a work in progress for most banks, and operating models are still evolving.

In conclusion, marketing automation presents immense opportunities for banks to revolutionize their marketing efforts, drive customer engagement, and achieve sustainable growth. By embracing automation and staying updated with the latest technologies, banks can position themselves at the forefront of innovation and deliver exceptional value to their customers. Postbank is one of the leading banks in Bulgaria and it adopted RPA to streamline its loan administration processes. The loan administration tasks that Postbank automated include report creation, customer data collection, gathering information from government services, and fee payment processing.

Automating this also allows human efforts to be redirected to tasks requiring more manual intervention. Coupled with empirical evidence that this technology can perform these analyses with higher accuracy, banking workflows only stand to benefit from this integration. Gen AI, along with its boost to productivity, also presents new risks (see sidebar “A unique set of risks”).

JPMorgan, for example, is using bots to respond to internal IT requests, including resetting employee passwords. The bots are expected to handle 1.7 million IT access requests at the bank this year, doing the work of 40 full-time employees. And at Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, a Japanese insurance company, IBM’s Watson Explorer will reportedly do the work of 34 insurance claim workers beginning January 2017. A lot of innovative concepts and ways for completing activities on a larger scale will be part of the future of banking. And, perhaps most crucially, the client will be at the center of the transformation.

With 15+ years of BPM/robotics and cognitive automation experience, we’re ready to guide you in end-to-end RPA implementation. The RPA tool generally includes an intuitive and simple user interface (UI) and out-of-the-box capabilities. The U.S. Congress continues to introduce legislation designed to protect consumer data usage and privacy. One example, the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2023, specifically targets GenAI systems and provides protections for people impacted by system use for decision making regarding housing, credit and education. Banks that foster integration between technical talent and business leaders are more likely to develop scalable gen AI solutions that create measurable value. Banks also need to evaluate their talent acquisition strategies regularly, to align with changing priorities.

This is where marketing automation steps in, providing banks with a powerful solution to effectively engage with their target audience and nurture lasting customer relationships. In the banking sector, where customer expectations are constantly rising, and competition is fierce, leveraging marketing automation has become crucial for staying ahead. Banking, inherently a business of digital transactions and trust, stands to reap unparalleled benefits from AI adoption. While AI won’t alter banking’s core functions, it promises to revolutionize its operational landscape. They use RPA automation to help key in, move, and transform data across systems to conduct financial analysis, execute repetitive manual processes, and generate valuable reports.

AI chatbots, as a vital part of banking automation, enhance security in banking by employing advanced algorithms to monitor and analyze transactions for potential fraud. They can recognize suspicious patterns faster than humans, adding an extra layer of security to protect sensitive customer data and financial transactions. Today Self-serve support in banking doesn’t have to mean endlessly waiting for the right IVR options in the myriad of complicated paths set on them. AI-powered automation is setting a new standard for customer empowerment, providing a seamless and intuitive way to manage their banking needs independently. AI chatbots offer real-time, personalized assistance for various queries, from checking account balances to navigating complex transactions.

Its potential reaches virtually every part of a bank, from the C-suite to the front lines of service and in every part of the value chain. Over several decades, banks have continually adapted the latest technology innovations to redefine how customers interact with them. The 2000s saw broad adoption of 24/7 online banking, followed by the spread of mobile-based “banking on the go” in the 2010s. As banks and financial institutions (FIs) navigate rapidly shifting customer preferences, the imperative to transform is urgent. Download this e-book to learn how customer experience and contact center leaders in banking are using Al-powered automation. They’re heavily monitored and therefore, banks need to ensure all their processes are error-free.