Automating The Bank’s Front Office: How to Overcome Challenges?

The bank’s front office commonly deals with several complicated and time-consuming manual processes, posing challenges for banks in ensuring a stable business system, and cost-effective resources in the operation process while complying with strict compliance guidelines. The key to resolving these obstacles is extending automation horizons through the application of different technologies. However, implementing automation in the bank’s front office is not a simple case. 

What’s holding banks from automating the front office?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been implemented and achieved certain successes in the back office and middle office, especially in Finance – Banking sectors. On the other hand, the front office is often overlooked despite the fact that many banks may understand the importance of applying automation to this department to optimize the customer journey. Hence, they are still hesitant and may not have appropriate measures to implement RPA.

Banks face some critical challenges when automating the front office. Source: nanonets.com

From my 4 year experience in this industry, I have noticed the challenges your bank may face in implementing the RPA are:

• High cost:

Each bank often has many branches and fast-growing users, which requires a large number of RPA bots to operate. Therefore, the initial investment cost can be relatively high.

• Complex processes requiring a high intelligence level of solution:

Some of the simple processes that focus on large, rule-based, and time-consuming tasks like data collection are perfect candidates for RPA automation. However, many front office processes such as Know Your Customer (KYC) or Anti Money Laundering (ALM) often require decision-making logic and a high level of accuracy. Therefore, the implementation of RPA, which is designated to work efficiently on repetitive and unattended tasks, would be a challenge for the bank’s front office. In addition, applying automation only in some front office or back office parts can create automation silos, preventing businesses from developing a seamless customer experience.

So how can banks overcome these challenges?

Hyperautomation to the rescue

The technology capabilities challenge

Let’s talk about the latter one first. For this challenge, Hyperautomation is the key to unlocking full automation, limiting disruption between the front office and back office processes.

For example, the front office often receives a lot of calls from customers asking for advice on the bank’s credit products. The bank officers then have to spend a lot of time searching for customer data on multiple systems, then manually updating the data and transferring it to the back office. However, the Hyperautomation allows the collection, classification, processing, evaluation of data, and data transfer between the front and back offices to run smoothly. Specifically:

• RPA’s robots collect customer data.
• Intelligent Document Processing/Machine Learning automatically processes customer records, extracts data, and hands it back to RPA bots.
• The RPA bots transfer data to the back office department to analyze customer profiles and make credit decisions for the front office staff to provide suitable solutions for customers.

For example, a bank’s customer onboarding process often requires a complex KYC process, including identity verification, screening, identity verification, reporting, and account activation. Hyperautomation serves as the ultimate solution to help businesses eliminate the cost and human resources of these processes thanks to its ability to inherit all the benefits of a diverse combination of technologies. Accordingly, Hyperautomation uses RPA to collect data and  IDP to process customer information, combines Machine Learning and Deep Learning to verify data, and then leverages the power of RPA to automatically extract customer data, copy-paste data, and transfer it to the right department and suggest appropriate credit limit to a process contract.

Hyperautomation combines the maturity power of RPA and IA for a complete automation solution for banks. (Source: isis-papyrus.com)

The cost challenge

• Can the vendor provide Ai alongside RPA?
• Can the vendor provide different RPA-integrated technologies to complete end-to-end Hyperautomation journey such as process mining, task mining, IDP, BPM,…?
• Is their consulting service good?

Integrating the core RPA platform and technologies like AI, BPM is a vital factor in helping your bank build a comprehensive automation solution, cut costs, manage automation program effectively and reduce the risk of failure when deploying technology solutions from many vendors.

In addition, the service factor also needs to be considered when choosing the right vendor because the analyst firms tend not to have the vision as the implementers, so they cannot outline the strategic plan and implementation steps for different phases of the automation solution.

Understanding that any business can embark on the automation journey and enjoy the benefits that this solution brings, we are constantly upgrading our products and building a comprehensive solution ecosystem. I recommend you take a look at our package solutions at an affordable cost and choose the right solution for your bank to expand the scope of automation and reap new success.

Payback time

• Can my bank achieve the return of investment (ROI) on automation within a short time period and the project can still scale fast?

The short payback period shows that your bank saves significant time and operating costs while still providing high efficiency.

Our payback time after implementing the automation solution reached 7 months and the scalability reached 95 % in the Summer RPA report from G2. Your bank can achieve the same or better result when cooperating with us.

Conclusion

Your bank can quickly embark on a roadmap towards intelligent automation to take advantage of the competitive advantage in the market. To find out more details, please contact akaBot to receive a consultation and experience a free trial automation process here.

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