3 Robotic Process Automation (RPA) trends in the financial services

By Joy Dumasia

RPA is the application of automation technology which allows the user to configure a software robot to capture and replicate human actions involved in existing processes such as transactions, editing data, recording or updating databases, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems.

The RPA revolution in banking can be compared to robotics in manufacturing and how it has disrupted the entire manufacturing industry. While RPA started mainly as a back-office focused automation technology, banks have successfully used RPA to automate middle-office and front office operations over the years. RPA provides significant improvements in the accuracy and processing time with increased productivity in transaction processing.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has become one of those buzzwords, often coming up in boardroom discussions in banks and financial institutions globally. Over the years, this technology has proven to be the most effective solution to address a bank’s automation challenges. One of the primary reasons for this is that RPA as a bank solution has constantly been evolving to meet a bank’s automation requirements through enhanced features, complementary tools, and strategic partnerships.

The following are 3 Robotic Process Automation (RPA) trends in the financial services:

• Smarter RPA bots

Many of the significant RPA solution providers launched versions of AI capability in their RPA offerings. These AI capabilities broadly focus on enhancing the RPA bot’s ability to digitise, extract, and unstructured process data hidden in scanned or electronic documents.

This is made possible using computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning to extract information from low-quality documents and detect handwriting and images. The other AI-based feature seen in RPA solutions is the conversational AI interface which allows the users to interact with the RPA bots. RPA solutions becoming smarter not only widens the number of processes that can be automated within an organisation, but the ability to capture and digitise unstructured data makes it a natural precursor for institutions looking to employ AI applications across their enterprise.

• Marketplace Ecosystem

Ecommerce platforms have paved the way for a marketplace model even within the financial service industry, and in recent years, many RPA solution providers have adopted the strategy of setting up marketplaces that showcase their solutions along with other partner solutions. From an automation perspective, most financial institutions know the value of RPA, but few know where to start.

RPA is often just a component of the customer’s bigger automation or digital transformation strategy, and therefore building a partner ecosystem becomes strategically important for an RPA supplier. The marketplace model effectively provides financial institutions with one-stop-shop access to a curated list of automation tools as well as complementary partner solutions. The other key driver of marketplaces by RPA suppliers is the increase in competition due to the growing demand for RPA solutions.

• Robotic Service Orchestration

This is another critical enabler to a successful RPA deployment. Recently, RPA saw suppliers make investments and build partnerships when robotic service orchestration specialists such as Enate to improve the efficiency of the bots within an organisation.

As RPA becomes an integral part of organisations, the successful scalability of RPA bots, especially attended bots, requires a sophisticated centralised orchestration platform. this platform should manage the various tasks associated with executing a process in a coordinated manner with the various systems within the organisation and the employees involved.

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