Financial officers often have to cope with constant document flow, pressure, and, in many cases, high workload. All that leads to human errors and finances don’t tolerate mistakes. 

 

That’s why more banks adopt robotic process automation (RPA). RPA offers a series of benefits—from less time required to fix staff mistakes to more work hours allocated to higher-value work. 

 

Gartner claims that financial departments can save 25,000 hours of work per year caused by human errors if they adopt RPA. 

 

In this guide, I’m explaining what RPA is, how it improves operations in the banking sector, and what financial institutions have already adopted it. 

 

What’s RPA Exactly?

 

Robotic process automation (RPA), just like any automation, aims to eliminate routine tasks and reduce the employees’ workload. Automation is usually applied to simple, well-established processes like transcribing texts or basic reporting. 

 

And RPA brings a ton of advantages to the banking sector.  

 

Unlike people, robots never forget things, work 24/7, and can’t be distracted by a phone call, Facebook post, or a colleague who has spilled coffee at their laptop. 

 

RPA is all about single-tasking—robots can’t do anything else before they finish the current assignment.

 

 

Some banks are well aware of these benefits. For example, the Royal Bank of Canada uses RPA for money transfers, bill payments, and processing bank statements via chatbots. 

 

The Singaporean bank managed to reduce the amount of time to re-price home loans from 45 to one minute using RPA software. 

 

Banking automation allowed Sumitomo Mitsui, a Japanese financial institution, to cut out 400,000 manual labor hours for their employees. And that’s just some of the examples.

 

How to Use RPA in Finances

 

As I’ve just said, RPA in finance has lots of advantages, but they worth nothing without the implementation. 

 

So let’s see how exactly financial institutions use robotic process automation—and what results it brings.   

 

Gives detailed information about bank services

 

Banks offer tons of services, but not all the clients know how to use them. 

 

Let’s say there’s a client who asks for a loan. First of all, the bank has to carefully check their credit history, transactions, income level, and other details. Which, of course, takes lots of time. 

 

Credit and deposit calculators transform it into a two-click process. RPA-based calculators analyze the client’s capacity to pay the loan and output the real periodic payment and show a preliminary bank’s decision.

 

Basic calculators only show the overall payment based on the max credit term, initial payment, and product price. 

 

Same with deposit calculators. An RPA-powered software calculates bonuses for loyal customers, deposit fees, and the deposit’s final interest rate. 

 

The largest bank in Colombia, Bancolombia, uses RPA to provide market insights to its clients, analyze their portfolio performance, and suggest further investments. 

 

Any Bancolombia client who has an investment portfolio of $7,000+ gets access to this feature. 

 

 

Automates accounting

 

RPA software automates invoices transcribing—from PDF into SAP-compatible formats and CSV spreadsheets. Then uploads the final version of the file to the server. 

 

That’s how it ensures compliance with the SOX act, preventing accounting errors and fraudulent practices.  

 

Drafting monthly payrolls is another routine task that doesn’t tolerate mistakes. But payroll processes are rule-based, they require to enter masses of data, and they’re highly repetitive. 

 

That’s when accounting software development solves the problem. Automation helps to check whether these payrolls were made correctly by comparing the data with ERP software. 

 

Helps to prevent money laundering

 

These days each bank has a department that deals with money laundering. They monitor transactions on high-risk accounts to detect suspicious activities. In most cases, investigations manually check every transaction made from such accounts. 

 

Which, of course, takes lots of time.

 

RPA streamlines the process. When the program spots suspicious activity, it downloads checks for a predefined period. The system works round the clock, so auditors get down to new cases right from the start of the next working day.

 

There’s even a better option: AI-powered RPA software. It costs a fortune but could solve even more problems like comparing transactions and identifying suspicious payments.

 

Updates client data

 

Bank stores tons of details about their clients, and this information should always be relevant. People often change addresses or phone numbers, so this data requires recurrent verification. 

 

But you can’t just call all the customers once per month and ask whether they moved to another city. So robotic process automation offers a couple of useful options here. 

 

The software makes a query to a government registry database, which keeps all the information about the client to update its own data.

 

That’s doesn’t always work for phone numbers, though. In many countries, cellular providers don’t ask for the ID as they register a mobile number. And it’s not hard to purchase another SIM card.

 

In this case, banks develop RPA software that extracts the information from client’s social media pages as users often show their phone numbers there. 

 

Opens a bank account, faster

 

To open an account for new clients, bank employees must enter lots of manual data into their system. Or even ask the client to be present at the bank branch. 

 

And in case the client makes a mistake while entering their data, the support team must reach back to them to fix it. 

 

RPA offers an alternative to this process. 

 

To open a bank account, clients only need to upload a clear photo of their driver’s license or ID. Then RPA software digitizes the document and matches the ID with the gov registry’s information. 

 

If any information (like the birth data) is missing, bank employees reach out to the client and ask to provide it. Then the data is transferred to the bank system, and clients receive their banking details. 

 

Danske bank shows a great example of an automated clients’ onboarding process. The bank has created a robot that transfers the data it collects when a bank adviser meets the client for the first time.

 

Usually, the bank adviser had to enter the data into their onboarding platform, then into the customer portal platform, which took 20-30 minutes. 

 

Using the RPA software, Danske bank reduced this time to seconds. 

 

RPA provides serious gains, from better productivity and accuracy to time and cost savings. 

And it helps businesses not only streamline the processes but keep their valuable employees more engaged—and less likely to leave the company. 

 

Author’s bio

 

Vitaly Kuprenko is a writer for Cleveroad. It’s a web and mobile app development company with headquarters in Ukraine. He enjoys writing about technology and digital marketing.