Finance leaders are under pressure to drive operational efficiency, lower costs, and deliver more output each year – but challenges abound.
Between managing data, keeping up with regulations, and exceeding customer expectations each year, it’s difficult to find time to assess improvement opportunities in your processes.
Yet, it’s necessary if your goal is to boost efficiency and increase your ability to take on new clients. That’s where robotic process automation comes in – specifically finance robotics.
What is robotic process automation?
Robotic Process Automation (or RPA for short) involves automating manual or repetitive tasks to execute them more quickly, improve accuracy, and win back time. It is a core component of Hyperautomation, which blends RPA, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) together in order to automate as many processes as possible.
RPA uses software robots (sometimes called ‘digital workers’) to mimic the repetitive tasks of human workers, such as data collection, data extraction between tools, and data validation.
The stats are certainly compelling. Gartner estimates that one robot (or bot for short) can do up to 30 times the work of a full-time human employee. That translates to massive time and money savings for any financial institution that implements the right RPA solution.
What are the benefits of RPA in banking and finance?
Banking and financial services companies can gain a lot from implementing an RPA solution in their organizations. The benefits of RPA adoption in the finance, banking, and insurance sector include:
- Massive time savings as any business process can be partially or fully automated, with or without human intervention. A finance bot can log into different systems, export data into Excel spreadsheets, and format them for further use. Of course there is much more that these bots can do aside from these few examples.
- Increased productivity as teams can now focus on higher-value work that drives revenue.
- Greater governance and regulatory compliance with internal controls thanks to greater visibility across your RPA system.
- Lower operating costs thanks to increased efficiency and ROI. You can deploy freed-up resources towards new projects or increased client acquisition.
- Provide additional value to your customers by refocusing time away from time-consuming, manual administrative tasks and more time responding to and assisting clients.
6 RPA use cases for the banking and financial services industry
If you’re considering implementing RPA software at your firm, you will have good company. Gartner estimates that 80% of finance leaders have implemented or are planning to deploy RPA technology in their organizations.
This provides plenty of learnings from established case studies to apply to your banking or finance RPA implementation. To give you an idea of the improvements you can expect, here are 6 use cases for RPA in finance services that each target a specific manual process:
- Customer onboarding
- Invoice processing
- Financial statement automation
- Account reconciliations
- Financial trend spotting
- Account closing and consolidation
RPA use case #1: Customer onboarding
The onboarding process forms a core part of the customer experience with your organization.
Using robotic process automation, you can speed up any repetitive task such as creating and updating customer accounts and folders, sending helpful learning resources, and notifying customers via email.
Best of all, finance bots can hand off a completed or blocked onboarding task to a human employee if needed.
RPA use case #2: Invoice processing
As a financial organization, invoice processing naturally forms part of your workflow. With an RPA tool, you can automate this repetitive task and generate, process, share, and record invoices on the fly.
RPA Use case #3: Financial statement automation
RPA software robots can help your finance function automate recurring financial statements. They can pull data from multiple Excel spreadsheets and other data sources, compile accurate financial statements, and send those statements to designated parties. They can also manipulate the data, highlight key values and build reports.
RPA use case #4: Account reconciliations
Record keeping is a core need for most finance-based businesses. Using a back-office software robot, financial organizations can reconcile different accounts and check them for accuracy and authenticity.
For example, you can deploy an RPA robot to reconcile liquidity and cash positions across different accounts receivable in your organization, then run financial statement automation to export the report to your management team.
RPA use case #5: Financial trend-spotting (forecast data, produce investment conclusions & more)
According to Gartner’s research, 60% of earnings calls are spent on questions and answers between analysts and company leaders.
Finance robots can scrutinize the transcripts of financial reporting calls using natural language processing (NLP) to spot confidence signals, inaccuracies, and falsehoods.
Spotting and eliminating human error helps analysts make better recommendations and investors to make better buying decisions.
RPA Use case #6: Account closing and consolidation
Finance bots can help you speed up the account closing process, reconcile outstanding payments, and send automated messages to the customer, your team, or third-party entities. This allows you to off board customers more speedily and reserve staff resources for existing and new customers.
Implement an RPA program at your organization
The world is changing, and digital transformation calls for urgent investments in tools that drive faster, better, and more accurate outputs. Robotic process automation fits well into any well-designed digital transformation strategy.
To implement RPA automation in financial settings, it’s important to restructure your finance team to enable automated work using humans and digital workers via RPA tools.
At Thrive Automation, we offer a broad range of RPA services for banking, finance, accounting, insurance, and tax businesses looking to kick-start their RPA journey and improve their organization’s efficiency.
Backed by a hyperautomation platform for businesses, your finance organization stands to become leaner, faster, and more efficient. We also provide support services to ensure your deployment goes as smoothly as possible.
Our track record speaks for us, too – we’ve helped Canadian companies in finance, accounting, medical, automotive, e-commerce and many more industries with RPA implementation that powers data collection and analysis, inventory management, order processing and invoicing, customer data management, supply chain management and much more.
Contact us today for a commitment-free consultation to learn more about how RPA can help your business.
