Intensifying competition in banking with the introduction of virtual and micro-banking services is prompting banks to deliver the best customer experience in order to maintain a competitive edge in the market. With the market becoming increasingly saturated, banks are adopting robotic process automation (RPA) to reduce human involvement across an array of tedious tasks to provide superior customer experiences, enhanced operational efficiency, and substantially cut down on labour costs.
Another key aspect aiding RPA in gaining penetration in banking services is the speed and accuracy with which the system performs a task. Bank employees have to deal with huge amounts of customer data daily which significantly increases the likelihood of errors when manually handling the data. Robotic process automation, on the other hand, offers banks a lucrative way to process data in minimum time and with maximum accuracy to provide for better customer experiences. For instance, the time taken for customer data validation is potentially reduced to seconds with the use of RPA. The replacement of human employees with bots for management of manual processes is estimated to aid banks in reducing processing costs by up to 30% to 70%.
Some of the critical processes which can be automated to reduce costs substantially are:
Customer Service
Customer service is vital to a bank’s reputation and impacts its revenue in the long run. With RPA, banks can significantly reduce the turnaround time for answering and addressing customer queries and reduce the need for human intervention in the process. Queries such as account information, balance, and application status can be automatically answered using rule-based logic allowing bank employees to focus on more critical tasks at hand. Additionally, advancements in artificial intelligence and natural language processing is allowing banks to replace human operators with chatbots which can effectively comprehend customer queries and mimic a response similar to a human employee.
Compliance with Regulations
The banking industry has to mandatorily comply with a specific set of regulations to operate legally under the law. Continuous monitoring of different processes by a human employee can severely impact a bank’s operational efficiency creating a need for hiring additional employees to particularly focus on compliance. RPA offers an alternative to overcome the problem with as many as 73% industry members voting for RPA to be a key enabler in compliance.
Payment Processing
Payment processing is a simple task which follows fixed steps. The procedure involves extraction of vendor information, its validation, and processing of payment, making the task a perfect candidate for automation using RPA. Robotic process automation uses optical character recognition to effectively read the vendor information from a digital copy of a physical receipt. It then validates the data by cross-referencing it with the database and then processes the payment. The system is designed to intimate the authorized personnel if any error are registered when processing.
Credit Card Approval
The method for credit card approval involves conducting numerous background checks and verification of a number of documents. RPA can streamline the whole process and eliminate the need for human involvement completely. Bots collect information from multiple databases and systems simultaneously and validate the information provided by the customer. Additionally, the system conducts background and credit checks quicker than its human counterpart to approve or disapprove a credit card application.
The automation of all the aforementioned processes is aiding banks in substantially lowering down processing costs while boosting consumer experience and maximizing operational efficiency.
