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8 REAL WORLD USE CASES for Robotic Process Automation in Finance
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WHAT IS THE ROLE OF robotic process automation in finance? Given the large amount of low complexity and high volume manual processes involved in finance (e.g., producing financial statements, card activation, account opening), RPA might serve the industry well.
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GLOBAL ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION (RPA) MARKET 2016-2021
$1,300m $975m $650m $325m $0m
2016
2017
2018
2019
Source: Horses for Sources
2020
2021
$1.2 BILLION global RPA market worth by 2021
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8 ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION USE CASES IN FINANCE You can learn from here which processes in the financial industry are best suited for automation and why. This way, you can equip yourself with concrete plans towards attaining your objectives. As a result, your automation journey will unravel on more solid ground.
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1. MAINTAIN DATA CONSISTENCY Customers’ details are constantly changing - their names, their addresses, or their credit scores. Software bots can use bank statements as reference points, extract the relevant data, and update records.
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2. ACCOUNTING Anyone who has ever worked in accounting knows that the effects of errors can be daunting, but also that it’s quasi-impossible to avoid them when you have to spend neverending hours entering data. In this case, automation can be seen as a win-win situation, both for the organisation and for the individual employee. From invoicing to accounts receivable, RPA can speed up the process, keep it error-“clean”, and, consequently, keep customers happy (and hence, more loyal).
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3. QUICK ACCOUNT OPENING Banks need to play it safe and verify thoroughly customers’ details, such as identity, past credit scores, or their conformity with compliance rules. RPA can be of great help in the detail validation process by managing any encountered divergence. The new account is then created automatically by the software robot, and its details are delivered to the client.
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4. STREAMLINE CARD ACTIVATION Request validation by checking the compliance rules, coordination between departments in order to keep data consistent, manual data entry, and so on. These are just some of the operations involved in activating customers’ card that need to be done under time pressure due to customers’ (legitimate) requirements for fast results. Software robots can perform the task in a timely manner, and they simply don’t make mistakes.
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5. ENSURE CONSISTENCY BETWEEN SYSTEMS Bank account balances must be fed into treasury systems. Before this can be done, one must find the language that both systems understand. An important benefit brought by robotic process automation in finance is that it can format bank data, such that treasury systems can “make sense of it” in order to generate reports.
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6. FINANCIAL PLANNING Financial planning requires putting together numerous financial statements from various departments, in order to maintain a crystal-clear picture of the current state of affairs and of the desired target. Employees can then deal with the complex reasoning processes in organising a sequence of timely to-do’s, while leaving the software bots to process and merge the statements.
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7. BETTER INVESTMENT OPTIONS Software robots are better able to track investment values, despite the possibility of sudden, abrupt changes. Bots can also assess an investor’s portfolio and thus minimise the inherent risk of investing. Relatedly, RPA tools can serve as financial advisors without the prohibitive costs of their human counterparts.
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8. SUPPORT AGAINST MONEY LAUNDERING Prevention of money laundering is a top priority for organisations in the finance industry. Robotic process automation can make a significant contribution to assisting companies’ compliance with the Australian AntiMoney Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 by ensuring that ‘know your customer’ (KYC) information is accurate, and that customers abide by the law.
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CONCLUSION Companies that wish to remain competitive should take advantage of the effects of RPA in finance: increased productivity, efficiency and cost effectiveness, customer and employee satisfaction. Such benefits have come up recurrently in the list above.
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THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME. Check out our blog for more articles about RPA.