Digitization and rapid technological advancement are shaping the world in the 21st century. One of the most significant advances can be seen in robotic process automation (RPA). As a result, the projected market size for rapid process automation will reach a staggering 6.81 billion USD by 2026.
RPA has become a crucial tool for many businesses, including banks, which had to deal with turbulence during the Covid pandemic. As a result, many use cases of RPA applications in the banking sector are surfacing. Thus, let’s check out some of those use cases.
- Trade Finance Operations: Scaling the trade finance operations and enhancing their presence across the financial supply chain has been a goal for many banks. RPA is helping them realize this goal with minimal hassle. Many banks operating in the market are already using RPA to automate different processes associated with management, issue, and closing letters of credit.
It is further worth mentioning that letters of credit are among the most preferred trade finance instruments. This helped the banks enhance visibility by 80% and turnaround time by 70%, along with a 50% reduction in operational cost.
- Anti-Money Laundering: Analysts spend about 10% of their time analyzing factors. Most of their effort goes into data generation and entry-related tasks and processes. As a result, RPA has become a valuable tool for anti-money laundering activities. With a manual approach, a process might require 30 mins to an hour based on complexity.
However, robotic process automation can seamlessly automate most of such tasks, saving both times and eliminating the chances of encountering human errors. As a result, RPA has become an essential tool for banks to reduce and monitor money laundering activities.
- Optimization Of The Contact Center: Covid has severely impacted the number of customers visiting banks to interact with personnel. This meant banks now had to deal with significant inbound calls. Additionally, failing to attend to these calls further cause more adverse implications for the bank.
RPA chatbots and tools can become convenient tools for banks in this scenario. For instance, RPA bots can seamlessly manage all the routine queries raised by customers, such as transaction queries or even queries about bank statements. This reduces the traffic significantly, further freeing employees for other value-driven tasks.
- Bank Reconciliation Process: The bank reconciliation process will certainly bag the top ranks for time-intensive procedures in a bank. There are huge silos of transactional data to deal with, which requires extensive knowledge and effort from the employee’s end. This is where RPA bots come to the rescue, as they can be programmed to replace manual processes with automation.
RPA can help banks manage all complex processes with rule-based automation that include verification of payment entries against the bank’s data and other records. Additionally, RPA bots can report all discrepancies and send out the records for further verification.
- Bank Guarantee Closures: You can call this a highly relevant and also specific RPA use case for numerous banks. Bank guarantee closures are complex processes that demand extensive team efforts from a highly competent team. The team members use manual processes to transcribe data between different disconnected legacy systems and determine the bank guarantee due for termination, closures, or even discharges.
Generating and distributing notice letters and executing the closures and reversals were also based on manual processes. Banks are now implementing RPA to automate these complex processes and facilitate hastened customer communication. This resulted in a 45% reduction in the process handling time.
- Loan Application Processes: Loan application is the ideal candidate that can garner extensive benefits from automation. In most cases, the documents for loan applications are now received through emails or bundled PDFs. Thus, sorting through all this data and verifying them to determine the creditworthiness of an individual requires a lot of time and effort when done manually.
Combining RPA with artificial intelligence competencies can be very helpful in such scenarios. This simplifies data extraction and verification, further eliminating the need to rely on manual tasks. Banks are now using such technologies to hasten their loan approval processes and boost customer satisfaction.
- Account Closure Processes: Bank account closure requires a lot of manual efforts as many tasks need to be taken care of. For starters, checking the availability of documents in bank records, updating data in the bank’s system, and even sending out a bunch of emails to branch managers and clients.
RPA bots become a very handy tool in this case as they can seamlessly automate all manual tasks without compromising accuracy. This frees up knowledgeable employees to focus on other value-driven tasks that will contribute to the growth and development of the banking organization as a whole.
- Report Generation: It is impossible to run a bank without reports. Many banks are now using RPA automation to boost the efficiency of processes and drive results. This helps banks generate better returns on investments.
Furthermore, banks are also using RPA to develop better templates for creating reports, standardize different data aggregation processes, and carry out easy reconciliation and review of all reports. This saves the bank a ton of time and effort, enabling them to focus on further enhancing their operational efficiency.
Bottom Line
As you can see, RPA is a very important and useful tool for banks of different scales and sizes. Most leading banks are already leveraging the competencies of RPA to boost their operational efficiency and drive amplified results. Thus, reach our SAP consulting company and augment your banking with everything that RPA has to offer.
