Business Process Automation (BPA) has been facilitating the world’s transition towards the digital-first approach across industries to ensure continuity in services. This phenomenon is weighing heavily on the banking industry with customers expecting digital and real-time services. The shift to the digital landscape is further accelerated by the growing compliance pressure, the explosion of fintech like neobanks, and other disruptive technologies.
As per a study by Forrester, the top reasons for customers dropping out of the traditional banking process include the tedious task of coordinating with various departments, longer waiting periods for disbursal of services, unclear communication, impractical paperwork, and the need to submit the same information multiple times.
All of these challenges – and a few others – can be effectively solved with an agile BPA strategy leveraging automation to speed up banking operations.
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Business Process Automation (BPA)
Business Process Automation (BPA) is a methodology where you employ software tools or bots to automate tedious, manual, and repetitive tasks. It essentially defines workflows to streamline these tasks and manage the complexity of executing them. Some of the sample tasks that BPA takes care of include data extraction, file transfers, and report generation.
Unlike RPA (Robotic Process Automation), which only takes care of automating repetitive tasks, BPA offers a comprehensive automation ecosystem and also includes RPA and RDA (Robotic Desktop Automation).
Because of benefits like improved service quality, minimal errors, and reduced operating costs, BPA is driving digital transformation initiatives in the banking and financial services domain.
BPA – Way Forward for Banking Industry
BPA, along with leading automation technologies like Hyperautomation, AI (Artificial Intelligence), and ML (Machine Learning), empower banks to define their financial offerings and customer journey. Here we take you through the top 6 use cases that assert the critical role BPA will play in financial services.
- KYC (Know Your Customer)
Any customer journey with a bank starts with a crucial step of customer onboarding. During this process, the bank verifies a customer’s financial health, risk appetite, and banking needs by a thorough investigation. Implementing BPA helps banks speed up the process of collecting information, cross-checking with sources, and establishing accuracy without compromising the quality involved. The automation framework avoids manual errors, human biases, and unnecessary resource utilization. - Compliance
Banks need to undertake periodic assessment and auditing exercises to detect and report fraudulent activities, compliance issues, misconduct, and other challenges. To ensure accurate evaluation and error-free process, banking institutes are implementing BPA and hyperautomation frameworks to conduct fraud and quality checks. These automation solutions help banks keep up with changing regulations and industry standards. - Core Banking Operations
Tasks that ensure the stability of any banking institute involve high-volume data processing and management. BPA implementation can seamlessly handle keeping track of every transaction and customer relationship, maintaining account calculations, protecting customer data, and other critical tasks for everyday operations. Banks are proactively investing in BPA projects to handle tasks that center around accuracy like risk reporting, transaction authentication, etc. - Retail Banking Services
Similar to KYC, banks need to build a thorough credit history and background profile to offer retail services like lending, credit, and debit cards. Traditionally, the disbursement of these services takes several days to process. But by implementing hyperautomation solutions, banks can compile the information from various data sources within minutes and increase the bank’s turnaround time significantly. The BPA implementation also enables banks to guardrail against fraud risks. - Customer Support
With the evolving financial landscape and advancing technologies, customer experience has become a crucial factor in a bank’s success story. Catering to customer queries, designing personalized services, and offering delightful services is the norm today. Automation empowers banks to meet and even exceed customer expectations in real-time. Implementing AI chatbots and analyzing data to customize solutions are just some of the applications of BPA for banking services. - Fraud Detection
Although many argue that digital transformation triggered evolving fraud-related challenges, it also gives banks capabilities like predictive analytics and cognitive computing to detect risk-heavy activities. With automation, banks can monitor and mitigate suspicious transactions with efficient alerting and flagging mechanisms.
Suggested Reading: How Can Hyperautomation Transform the Insurance Industry?
Conclusion
Automation technologies are becoming an essential part of banking operations. Financial institutions are only going to step up integrating BPA with its core functions. It doesn’t just simplify its business-wide processes but greatly reduces staffing and operational costs. However, implementing an effective automation strategy is a little challenging. Identifying the right mix of technologies, understanding the industry, and compliance needs play an important role. To execute a successful BPA solution, you will need an experienced enterprise automation partner like EvoluteIQ.
You can reach out to us at https://evoluteiq.com/contact-us/