John had experienced an agonizing wait after he had applied for a bank loan – Five working days had passed without the sign of loan approval. The sluggish pace of loan origination process was more than John could handle, caused by manual efforts driving the process in entirety. In comes Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to lend the speed needed to facilitate faster loan decisions. Rule-based decisions promoted by RPA have reduced the customer waiting time from days to hours to even minutes.
Where RPA optimizes operations by replacing repetitive human tasks, it has also ignited the need for intelligence-infused automation, as in the case of scenarios where ‘making judgment’ matters the most – becomes more relevant when ‘intelligent automation’ can perk up judgment-oriented processes. For instance, fraud detection and prevention reap rewards from cognitive RPA wherein machine learning can be used to spot anomalies from customer spending behavior, roll out preventive measures like validation check and prevent fraud from being committed by a trickster.
The compelling benefits of intelligent process automation (IPA) has left financial institutions pondering on ways and means to embed IPA across functions. What is the three-step formula that can set financial institutions on road to intelligent automation?
Meeting the ‘Data Imperative’
There is a data twist to the IPA transition. Infusing intelligence into Robotic Process Automation means looking beyond structured data. For instance, if the need was just to trigger emails to a group of recipients, RPA fits the need to a T. But when it comes to making sense of what the recipients have shared through a mail and act accordingly, RPA entwined with NLP, ML, text analytics, data mining and semantics become critical to capture the essence of the communication and respond in a relevant manner. While there is a need to make sense of unstructured data flowing from social media, email exchanges, financial filings, call notes and sensor data and nurture intelligent automation, AI is embedded into RPA to infuse intelligence into processes.
Creating the ‘smart workflow’
How would smart workflows aid financial institutions in the acceleration of intelligent automation?
In connecting with customers, financial institutions plan campaigns encompassing loans, customer service, product launches and brand building, target the right audience, analyze results to rise above the rest. While targeting remains a critical component of the campaign, RPA can drive collation of critical data for campaigns through web and social media scraping.
For marketing financial products aimed at the millennial crowd, social sites like, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter could offer valuable leads. But then, when the target audience is whittled down based on their age, demographics and other variables such as interest, workplace and behavior, messaging, pitch, posts and ads could take different turns. This is where smart workflows prove to be a valuable aid to financial institutions for tactical targeting, wherein the data collation performed by RPA can be assisted by intelligent automation to form sub-segments from the audience list as well as create relevant pitch and messaging to lure the segments.
Bringing ‘intelligent automation’ to life
Here is a scenario showcasing the effect of intelligent process automation across financial institutions. For financial institutions, it becomes an absolute imperative to detect and prevent check frauds. Reams and reams of checks to be checked to thwart fraud from being perpetrated. That is to make sure that the handwritten checks are not dupes masquerading as the original. Though scanning of checks is possible, it takes humongous ‘people hours’ to nip any fraud attempt in the bud.
Entwining intelligence with automation, as in the case of OCR and machine learning technology, can facilitate intelligent scanning to process checks and find signs of fraud. Intelligent automation not only leads to a transformed process but also results in great improvement in the accuracy and speed of checking for fraudulent transactions and in the reduction of fraud risks.
Saksoft partners with UiPath to explore RPA and help clients make the most of RPA. Saksoft galvanizes organizations to embed intelligence into RPA and reap rewards of intelligent automation.
