The world is at its peak in the digital revolution and proliferation of the latest technologies. Looking at the massive adoption, implementation, and usage of these fast-rising technologies, it is now safe to say that we are entering into the age of automation. The financial service sector or the conservative industry, as it is perceived to be, has undergone some radical changes over the last few years. It is no surprise that the banking sector has been leading and welcoming automation solutions and innovations, given that it is the sector with the most labour-intensive processes. There has also been a paradigm shift with the way clients prefer to communicate with their banks due to the escalation of digital devices.
A few months ago, CEO António Horta-Osório of Lloyds Banking Group was excited about the progress made, “We are already delivering a number of tangible customers in business outcomes against each of our strategic priorities supported by £1.5 billion of strategic investment to-date. the successes reinforce our existing competitive advantages and create nuance, equipping us to compete more effectively both today and in the future”.
CFO Paul Donofrio says, “Our digital and physical worlds are increasingly connected and synergistic. Digital appointments are a great example of that. 13% of our financial centre platform traffic is now driven by appointments set in advance. This allows us to better prepare and staff for the specific needs of our customers and improves their experience.”Customers continue to transact and interact with us in person as well as through digital channels. So we continue to invest in both, by adding financial centres and renovating existing ones as well as enhancing and adding capabilities to our number one ranked digital banking platform. In fact, over the past year, we have opened 98 financial centres, renovated 562 and installed nearly 1,000 ATMs, and remain on track to hit our build-out targets”.
Supporting and enhancing the customer experience is one of the importance of digital transformation, CFO of Citigroup Mark Mason observed that technological investments would deliver back-end and customer-facing benefits when he said, “Technology helps with the client experience in terms of the lower costs to serve, but also improving the way, and the experience that our clients have with us…then technology helps with the efficiency of how we run our operations. So expanding our cloud infrastructure, removing legacy data centres and physical service, using automation, for example. So a number of different buckets are impacted by the technology spend that we make”.
Wells Fargo Announces Plans to Pilot
Interim CEO Allen Parker of Wells Fargo says, “We also announced plans to pilot, next year, Wells Fargo Digital Cash, which is designed to enable us to complete internal booked transfers of cross-border payments running on our first distributed ledger technology platform. This new technology should drive operational efficiencies by providing longer operating windows and real-time processing. Finally, we announced a data exchange agreement with Plaid, a leading data platform. With this agreement, our customers will have greater control over the bank account information they share with Plaid-supported apps, including the ability to turn on or off data sharing through Wells Fargo’s Control Tower.”We have adopted a modular approach to transformation, and we continue to successfully execute against this. It provides benefits to both customers and colleagues as we deliver change quicker, more cost-effectively, and on a more meaningful scale than ever before.”
Most banking sectors have decided to give a befitting reply by adopting the digital building blocks full steam ahead of what Is called the “ABCD of digital technologies,” where A stands for Artificial intelligence and Robotic Process Automation, B stands for Big-data and Advanced Analytics, C also stands for Cloud computing and finally, D stands for Devices in several processes including cross-border payment, smart contracts, KYC (Know Your Customer) procedure and trade finance.
- Artificial intelligence (AI): Artificial intelligence, also Machine intelligence and Machine learning are referred to as the intelligence displayed by machines in conjunction with natural intelligence (NI), which is displayed by human beings and other animals. Machine learning algorithms are the core features of Artificial Intelligence, it is a trend that is increasingly boosting financial institutions since it is the kind of software that self-improves as more and more data is being fed to it.
- Robotics Process Automation (RPA): When we talk of Robotics Process Automation (RPA), it refers to software that can be easily be programmed to undertake basic tasks just like a human employee would do across applications. It is rapidly emerging into a highly efficient way to help unearth digital transformation in financial institutions and making various processes much simpler.
- Blockchain: Blockchain simply refers to transactions (i.e., the ‘blocks’) that are stored securely in a public database (i.e., the ‘chain’). It makes sure that there is comprehensive transparency of various tracking because of its ability to track and trace.
With these technological advancements coming together, banks are able to thrive in the ever-changing and ever-growing world. Automation has proven to be the key to the future because, over the past few years, it has provided the financial sector with a timely, better, and smooth execution of banking processes.
- Automation in back-office is the secret to better banking:
Automation has, over the years, proven to be a real game-changer in the banking sector, especially when it comes to back-office processes. The back-office, most of the time, has thousands of people receiving and processing requests that customers bring in, which is not just costly but also slow, it also tends to produce a high error rate and leads to inconsistent outcomes. Automation brings about innovations that can help reduce time spent in back-office processing.
ABCD of Digital Technologies Implemented With Relative Ease
“ABCD of digital technologies” has a basic nature that is such that many banks have implemented them with relative ease into their existing environment. Even though these technologies promise to cause disruptions to traditional bankers, it does not bring destruction. Such banks support the two-dimensional impact on their business, which are mainly Customer experience and cost efficiency, and is also the reason behind the relatively fast implementation of automation. Cloud computing, these days, seem to be increasingly gaining popularity because of the speed at which both Big-data and Artificial Intelligence solutions can be brought together for businesses. Back-offices have been encouraged to explore other options to introduce device independence to their clients and staff members inclusive, due to the use of mobile devices across all sections of consumers.
- Automated Teller Machines (ATMs)
- Advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions such as deep learning, alongside face or image recognition using real-time camera images, can be adopted at ATMs to spot and prevent crimes or frauds.
- Automation brings about improved customer experience
- Through its dramatic speed, automation has promised to improve customer experience. Automation eliminates wait time, makes decisions quickly and comprehensive transaction tracking.
- Automation fraud detection
- The automated fraud anomaly detection program, once implemented and deployed, would help banks increase the accuracy of anti-money laundry detection and fraud detection.
- Revolution in risk management
- Clients or customers can be offered customized products by doing risk analysis, looking at historical data, and getting rid of human errors from manually-handled models.
- Provision of security
- Automation can track down spurious emails and suspicious behaviours to not only but possibly predict breaches in security.
It is certainly a good time to leverage automation in your business and begin your journey towards automation, employee engagement and creating a strong competitive advantage. The automation experts at https://www.ntansa.com are a great next step to help you begin to achieve many of the same benefits your competitors are now leveraging.
