Automating the card renewal process is a significant step forward in the digitalization and operational optimization within the banking industry. In this era of digitalization, customer experience and operational efficiency have become two key factors determining the success of every bank. Therefore, banks are dedicating significant efforts to applying technology in their operational processes.
Banking Automation: The Key to Superior Customer Experience and Optimal Operational Efficiency
In recent years, banking automation has become an inevitable trend, bringing breakthroughs in how financial institutions operate and interact with customers. Deloitte estimates that applying Intelligent Automation (IA) can help businesses reduce operating costs by an average of 25% to 40%. This is a significant motivation for banks worldwide to invest in automation.
Automation Technology: Simply put, automation is the application of technologies such as software, virtual robots (RPA), and artificial intelligence (AI) to perform repetitive tasks and rule-based processes that previously required human intervention. The main goals of automation are to enhance efficiency, minimize errors, save time and costs, and free up human resources to focus on more strategic and creative work.
Why is Automation Suitable for Application in Banking Processes?
The banking industry involves a large volume of transactions, complex processes, and requires high accuracy. These are precisely the characteristics suitable for applying automation to optimize banking processes.
- Enhanced Efficiency and Productivity: Tasks such as data processing, information verification, and report generation can be performed quickly and continuously by automated systems, helping banks save significant time and resources. According to Gartner, by 2026, 30% of enterprises will automate more than half of their operational systems, a sharp increase from less than 10% in mid-2023
- Reduced Errors: Humans are prone to errors due to fatigue or subjective factors. Automation eliminates this factor, ensuring accuracy and consistency in all processes.
- Improved Customer Experience: Automation allows banks to provide faster, more convenient, and more personalized services. Customers no longer have to wait long for routine transactions and can access services anytime, anywhere.
- Enhanced Compliance: Automated processes can be set up to strictly comply with regulations and policies, helping banks minimize legal risks.
- Cost Optimization: In the long run, investing in automation helps banks reduce operating costs, from personnel to other resources. A Deloitte study indicates that applying Intelligent Automation (IA) can help businesses reduce operating costs by an average of 25% to 40%.
Typical success stories from leading banks include JPMorgan Chase – a leading American bank, which has widely implemented Intelligent Automation, including automating the mortgage approval process. By using AI and Machine Learning, JPMorgan Chase significantly reduced mortgage approval time from weeks to just days, while minimizing errors and enhancing customer experience. The IA system also helps the bank comply with complex regulations more effectively.
In addition, Barclays – a British multinational bank – has successfully applied Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in many processes, including credit file processing and card management. Automating repetitive tasks has helped Barclays reduce credit file processing time from hours to just minutes, improved accuracy, and freed up employees to focus on higher-value activities. Barclays also uses RPA to automate the credit card reconciliation process, helping to issue cards more quickly.
Automating Card Renewal: Practical Benefits for Both Banks and Customers
The traditional card renewal process often consumes a lot of time and effort for both bank staff and customers. Customers might have to visit a branch, fill out many forms, and wait. Banks spend human resources on processing procedures, printing, and sending cards.
Automated card renewal has thoroughly addressed these shortcomings:
For banks:
- Reduces employee workload, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks.
- Increases processing speed, reducing waiting time for customers.
- Saves costs for printing, mailing, and record management.
- Enhances the efficiency of card lifecycle management.
For customers:
- The renewal process is quick, convenient, and can be done online or via a mobile app.
- No need to visit a branch directly, saving time and effort.
- Easily receive notifications and track renewal status.
- Experience a more modern and user-friendly banking service.
The bank card renewal process is a periodic activity that occurs continuously to ensure customers can seamlessly continue using financial services when their current card expires. The nature of this process leads to many operational limitations:
- Diverse Card Types: Banks offer various card types, each with its own renewal process and specific conditions, including:
- Debit Card: Usually renewed for a fixed period or upon customer request.
- Credit Card: The renewal process is more complex, often based on credit history, usage level, and other bank conditions.
- Prepaid Card: Can be renewed by topping up money or according to a specific cycle.
- Other special cards: Corporate cards, linked cards, etc., with their own renewal regulations.
- Manual Nature: Most steps in the traditional card renewal process still depend on manual operations by bank staff, from checking information, evaluating renewal conditions, creating renewal requests in the system, printing new cards, to notifying and sending cards to customers.
- Repetitive Nature: With a large number of customers and periodic card expiration cycles, the card renewal process occurs continuously and repetitively, consuming a lot of time and resources from employees.
- High SLA (Service Level Agreement) Requirements: Customers expect the card renewal process to be fast, convenient, and not interrupt service usage. Delays in renewal can lead to dissatisfaction and affect the bank’s reputation.
- Strict Compliance Requirements: The card renewal process must strictly comply with State Bank regulations on customer information security, professional procedures, and related standards.
- High Accuracy Requirements: All information related to the new card (card number, expiration date, CVV code, etc.) must be processed with absolute accuracy to avoid errors and security risks.
These characteristics show that the traditional card renewal process entails many challenges such as being time-consuming, prone to errors, difficult to meet SLAs, and requiring large resources. This is precisely the “bottleneck” that needs to be resolved by automation.
Solutions for Automating the Card Renewal Process
- Identify Soon-to-Expire Cards: The bank’s system automatically extracts a list of soon-to-expire cards based on their validity period.
- Check Renewal Conditions: RPA robots access the bank’s core system to automatically check customer information, transaction history, credit history, and other established renewal conditions.
- Create Renewal Request: If the card meets the conditions, the RPA robot automatically creates a renewal request in the system.
- Approve Renewal Request: For normal cases, the system can automatically approve. For special cases (e.g., credit cards with poor credit history), the robot can forward the request to the management department for approval.
- Create and Print New Card: The automated card printing system receives the request and proceeds to create and print the new card. Card information is securely transmitted.
- Verify and Create Electronic Record: The RPA robot can verify information on the printed card and automatically create related electronic records.
- Notify Customer: The system automatically sends notifications to customers via email, SMS, or banking application about the card renewal status and method of card collection.
- Monitor Card Delivery Status: The RPA robot can track the card’s shipping status via the postal system or shipping partner.
- Activate New Card: The customer performs card activation steps according to instructions (which can be sent automatically via SMS/email).
- Archive Records: The RPA robot automatically archives all relevant information regarding the renewal process into the electronic storage system.
Thus, with 10 steps in the card renewal process, over 50% of the steps can be automated for operational optimization.
Applying card renewal automation brings clear efficiencies compared to manual processes, contributing to a comprehensive bank automation strategy:
- Significant Time Savings: RPA robots can perform tasks quickly and continuously 24/7, significantly reducing the processing time for each card renewal request compared to manual execution by staff. It is estimated that processing time can be reduced by up to 80-90%.
- Increased Accuracy: Eliminating manual data entry and verification operations minimizes errors in the card renewal process, ensuring absolute accuracy of card information. The goal is to achieve near 100% accuracy.
- Reduced Operating Costs: Automation helps reduce the need for human resources for repetitive tasks, saving printing, mailing, and other related costs. It is estimated that operating costs for this process can be reduced by 50-60%.
- Improved Customer Experience: The card renewal process is fast, convenient, and causes minimal disruption to customers, enhancing satisfaction and loyalty. Customer waiting time can be reduced by up to 70%.
- Ensured Compliance and SLA: Automation helps ensure the card renewal process strictly complies with regulations and meets SLA targets for processing time.
- Enhanced Control and Monitoring Capabilities: Every step in the automation process is recorded, allowing banks to easily track status, control risks, and extract reports.
- Freed Up Human Resources: Bank staff can focus on more complex, strategic tasks and direct customer interaction, enhancing overall work efficiency.
- Flexible Scalability: The automation system can be easily scaled to meet future increases in the number of cards needing renewal.
akaBot (FPT Corporation) Automation Solution for Card Renewal Process
In an increasingly competitive environment, optimizing operational processes and enhancing customer experience are top priorities for banks. The akaBot (FPT Corporation) card renewal automation solution is the key for financial institutions to achieve these goals quickly and effectively. With impressive implementation capabilities for 30 leading banks and financial institutions, along with experience in automating over 500+ processes (bank-wide) in a single bank, akaBot is not just a technology tool but also a strategic partner with deep expertise in banking operations.
The akaBot team deeply understands the challenges and specifics of the card renewal process, thereby building a comprehensive automation solution that helps banks:
- Accelerate card renewal speed: Eliminates manual operations, reducing waiting times for customers and employees.
- Enhance accuracy: Minimizes human-factor errors, ensuring a smooth and accurate process.
- Save operating costs: Optimizes resources, reduces printing, mailing, and record management costs.
- Improve customer experience: Provides a fast, convenient card renewal process that can be performed anytime, anywhere.
- Free up human resources: Allows employees to focus on more strategic tasks and customer interaction.
The distinct advantage of the akaBot solution lies in its rapid deployment capability, helping banks quickly achieve measurable benefits from automation such as saved working hours, reduced operating costs, and improved accuracy. Furthermore, FPT’s team of experts is committed to 24/7 support, ensuring stable system operation and timely resolution of any issues.
Automating the card renewal process is not only a solution that helps banks optimize operational activities but also an important step in enhancing customer experience. By leveraging the power of banking automation, financial institutions can address “bottlenecks” in repetitive processes, ensure accuracy, compliance, and deliver the highest customer satisfaction in the digital era.