Member Article

Robotic Process Automation in Financial Services: 12 Recommendations from the Front Line

By James Hall, CEO, Genfour

Financial Services (FS) has always faced unique IT challenges – massive transaction volumes, low tolerance for failure, regulatory compliance and the management of legacy technologies. Robotic process automation (RPA) has climbed high up the agenda for many FS firms simply because many industry leaders see automation as an opportunity to address these specific IT concerns while driving new efficiencies and capabilities.

These next 12 tips are designed for those who are at the beginning of their automation journey, and who may be building a business case to gain support for intelligent automation.

Key Recommendations

• Start small enough to create a belief in automation, and avoid complicated processes. Select processes that are most valuable in terms of productivity, and then select ‘champions’ - people who are connected in the business to help ‘PR’ automation to the business. This will promote ownership of automation within the business.
• Focus on shared platforms. It is better to think in groups of systems to develop interfacing with common systems. This focus on shared platforms (rather than business areas) is key.
• ‘Just do it.’ If businesses spend too much time prioritising, they lose months in automation value. The learning you’ll experience from getting a few processes working will be invaluable.
• However, don’t tackle anything too big before you understand automation thinking, and never automate a broken process or something that’s not stable. Fix it first. In financial services, there are a lot of broken processes. Many departments don’t understand their processes end-to-end.
• Take a look at your backlog and programme level pipeline – what has been sat in the pipeline for a long time? Your backlog may be the best place to start with automation.
• Automate the basic, and then focus on the value add. RPA can be seen as a starter to simply get something running 6-8 weeks. Once automation is running, it is easy to show how you can duplicate the functionality.
• Let people bring their problems to the table (manual workarounds are a common problem.) Get lots of ideas to feed in to a robotics programme.
• Don’t just replace – everyone knows the importance of not automating bad processes. But there’s an upside opportunity, too. Seek to add value from the RPA roll out, not just replace manual work.
• Map end-to-end workflows – which will help identify what process needs to be human, what can be automated and what needs to change. For example, some processes only exist because they are workarounds for resource-constrained team or to support manual processes. These might be eliminated.
• Maintain standards around how your build processes so that you don’t rely on individuals for continuity purposes. Processes should be 100% documented, so that people can pick up the documents and work from them.
• Re-usability is key. By re-using systems and robotics modules, businesses can deliver new processes faster.
• Costing out an automation programme may be a daunting task, but the role automation will play in the continual improvement of the organisation is a concept that should be worked in to the costing.

The Future

Some FS firms are worried about automation solutions changing too quickly for them to keep ahead of the curve. But they can rest easy in that the tools may change, but automation thinking is the real driver forward for achieving long term results. What is clear is that FS firms are switched on to the pivotal part automation can play in the continual improvement to organisations.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by James Hall .