Automation in the banking sector has become a widely adopted technology, particularly in back-office processes. The automation of email account management plays a vital role in ensuring seamless communication and daily operations for all employees, while significantly saving time and effort for the IT department.
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Automation – A Popular Technology in Banking
Automation in banking involves applying technologies such as software, virtual robots (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to automate manual, repetitive tasks or complex business processes previously performed by humans. The main goals of automation are to enhance operational efficiency, minimize errors, optimize costs, improve customer and employee experience, and strengthen the bank’s competitiveness.
Key Banking Departments and Business Units Driving Automation Initiatives
The potential for automation applications is immense and spans across all departments and business units within a bank. However, some departments are often prioritized for automation implementation, including:
- Operations: This area concentrates on many manual, repetitive processes such as transaction processing, reconciliation, reporting, and record management. Automation helps reduce employee workload, accelerate processing speed, and minimize the risk of errors.
- Information Technology (IT): Automating tasks related to system management, monitoring, software deployment, maintenance, and user support helps the IT team focus on more critical strategic projects.
- Accounting – Finance: Processes such as data entry, data reconciliation, financial report generation, and accounts receivable/payable management can be automated, ensuring accuracy and timeliness.
- Customer Service: Applying chatbots and virtual assistants helps answer inquiries, provide information, and support customers 24/7, enhancing experience and reducing pressure on employees.
- Risk Management & Compliance: Automating data collection and analysis, and transaction monitoring helps early detection of abnormal signs, ensuring compliance with regulations.
- Human Resources (HR): Processes such as employee record management, payroll calculation, leave tracking, and initial recruitment can be automated, helping HR focus on more strategic activities.
Strategic Prioritization: Back-Office Automation in Banking Operations
Among the aforementioned business units, the back office is often prioritized for automation applications. This is because the back office focuses on internal processes, which are highly repetitive, handle large volumes of data, and involve less direct customer interaction. Automating these processes brings clear benefits such as:
- Reduced operating costs: Automation helps reduce the need for human resources for manual tasks, cutting down on paperwork, printing costs, and other resources.
- Increased efficiency: Virtual robots can operate 24/7 with higher speed and accuracy than humans, accelerating process execution.
- Minimized errors: Eliminating the human element in repetitive tasks helps reduce the risk of errors due to oversight or fatigue.
- Enhanced job quality: Back Office employees can be freed from tedious tasks to focus on more complex and strategic assignments.
- Improved compliance: Automation helps ensure processes are executed according to regulations and standards, minimizing legal risks.
A prime example of prioritizing automation in the Back Office is the process of creating, modifying, deleting, and assigning permissions for employee email accounts. This is an essential process, occurring frequently whenever there are new employees, changes in employee positions, or employee departures. If performed manually, this process is time-consuming, prone to errors, and can lead to security issues if not tightly managed.
Description of the Email Account Creation, Modification, Deletion, and Permission Assignment Process
The process of creating, modifying, deleting, and assigning permissions for email accounts in banks typically involves the following basic steps:
1. Receiving Requests:
- New Creation: The HR department sends a request to create an email account for new employees (often with personal information, job position).
- Modification: Employees or direct managers send requests to modify account information (e.g., change display name, update contact phone number).
- Deletion: The HR department sends a request to lock/delete the email account of employees who have resigned.
- Permission Assignment: Department managers or the IT administration department send requests to grant access to shared mailboxes or other resources.
2. Review and Approval:
- Requests are sent to the IT department or system administration department for validity and completeness checks.
- Depending on bank regulations, requests may require approval from department heads, directors, or other authorized management levels.
3. Execution of Creation/Modification/Deletion/Permission Assignment:
- IT staff log in to the email management system (e.g., Microsoft Exchange, Google Workspace).
- New Creation: Enter necessary information to create a new email account.
- Modification: Search for the account to be modified and update information.
- Deletion: Perform operations to lock or delete the account.
- Permission Assignment: Grant appropriate access permissions for the requested account.
4. Notification and Handover:
- Upon completion, the IT department notifies the requester (HR department, employee, manager) about the account’s creation/modification/deletion/permission assignment status.
- For new accounts, login information (username, initial password) is usually handed over to the employee via the HR department or directly.
5. Record Keeping:
- Relevant information regarding the request and the execution process is stored for later control and reconciliation.
Applying Automation in the Email Account Creation, Modification, Deletion, and Permission Assignment Process in Banks
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology is particularly well-suited for automating the process of creating, modifying, deleting, and assigning permissions for email accounts:
- Step 1: Receiving Requests: Robots can be programmed to monitor incoming emails from HR or related departments, automatically extracting necessary information from forms or email content.
- Step 2: Review and Approval (Partial): Robots can perform basic checks for completeness and format of information. For the approval process, robots can automatically forward requests to relevant approvers based on established rules.
- Step 3: Execution of Creation/Modification/Deletion/Permission Assignment: This is the step where RPA demonstrates its power most clearly. Robots can be programmed to:
- Log in to the email management system.
- Perform creation, modification, and deletion of accounts accurately based on extracted information.
- Assign access permissions based on employee roles and departments.
- Step 4: Notification and Handover: Robots can automatically send notification emails to the requester and new employees regarding account status and login information.
- Step 5: Record Keeping: Robots can automatically store relevant information in the record management system or database.
Most steps in the process of creating, modifying, deleting, and assigning permissions for email accounts can be automated by RPA, bringing significant efficiency.
Efficiency When Applying Automation
Applying RPA to the email account creation, modification, deletion, and permission assignment process brings clear changes:
Before Automation:
- Manual processes were time-consuming and prone to errors.
- IT staff had to perform repetitive tasks, leading to account information errors, affecting access and security.
- Labor costs for these tasks were not small, and users often had to wait a long time for requests to be processed, affecting work efficiency.
- Monitoring and controlling request status also faced many difficulties.
After Automation (Measured Efficiency):
- Up to 90% reduction in processing time: Robots perform tasks quickly and continuously, shortening request processing time from hours/days to just a few minutes.
- Achieving near-perfect accuracy (99.99%): Robots operate according to programmed rules, completely eliminating errors due to manual data entry.
- Saving up to 70% in operating costs: Significantly reducing the need for human resources for manual tasks, optimizing related costs.
- 5x faster processing speed: Requests are processed quickly, allowing new employees to start work sooner and other requests to be resolved promptly.
- 100% improvement in control and monitoring capabilities: All robot activities are recorded, providing detailed logs, making it easy to track status and control the process.
- Freeing up 50% of IT staff’s working time: IT staff can focus on more critical strategic projects instead of repetitive tasks.
Considerations When Implementing Automation in Banking
Implementing automation in banks needs to be done carefully and with a plan to ensure success and minimize risks. Here are some important considerations:
- Clearly define goals and scope: Banks need to clearly define which processes need to be automated, the specific goals to be achieved (e.g., reducing processing time by what percentage, reducing costs by how much), and the scope of implementation.
- Assess feasibility: Carefully evaluate the technical, cost, and benefit feasibility of automating the chosen process.
- Choose appropriate technology and partners: Banks need to select automation technology suitable for the specific characteristics of the process and existing systems. Partnering with reputable and experienced partners is crucial.
- Ensure safety and security: Information safety and security are vital for banks. It is essential to ensure that the deployed automation solution does not increase security risks and complies with data security regulations.
- Standardize processes: Before automating, banks should review and standardize current processes to ensure efficiency and ease of automation.
- Training and change management: Employees need to be trained on new technologies and change managed effectively to ensure acceptance and cooperation from employees.
- Monitor and evaluate effectiveness: After deployment, continuously monitor the effectiveness of the automation system and make necessary adjustments to optimize performance.
- Comply with legal regulations: Automation implementation needs to comply with legal regulations related to data protection, privacy, and other banking industry regulations.
Automation Solutions for Banks from akaBot (FPT Corporation)
akaBot, from FPT Corporation, is a comprehensive and intelligent robotic process automation platform designed to help businesses, including banks, automate repetitive, rule-based tasks and interact with various systems as humans do. akaBot solutions support the automation of email account creation, modification, deletion, and permission assignment processes in banks:
- Diverse interaction capabilities: akaBot can interact with various popular email management applications and systems such as Microsoft Exchange, Google Workspace, as well as other internal bank systems via user interface (UI) or API (if available).
- Intelligent data extraction and processing: akaBot’s virtual robot assistants can be programmed to automatically and accurately extract information from request emails, forms, or related documents.
- Automated operation execution: akaBot can automatically perform steps to create new accounts, modify, delete accounts, and assign access permissions according to established business rules and logic.
- User and access rights management: akaBot provides tools to manage robot users and assign access rights, ensuring system safety and security.
- Reporting and monitoring: The akaBot platform provides intuitive reporting and monitoring functions, helping banks track the performance of virtual bot assistants and identify potential issues.
- Flexible scalability: akaBot can be easily scaled to meet the growing automation needs of banks.
- High security: akaBot is designed with advanced security features to ensure the safety of bank data and systems.
Automating & Optimizing Operations from the Smallest Links
Automation offers immense potential in optimizing business processes within banks, including the process of creating, modifying, deleting, and assigning permissions for email accounts. Intelligent and planned automation implementation will help banks enhance operational efficiency, reduce risks, improve employee and customer experience, and strengthen competitiveness in an increasingly digitalized environment.
