Innovation Driven by Competition

The future success of BSFI firms will directly reflect their willingness to embrace technology. In a world where customers are habituated to real-time interactions, high levels of proactive business and tech innovation, it is only natural to expect the same from banking and financial firms. BFSI firms must recognize this and have a depth and clarity of vision, backed by cognizant investments in software and technology, to set themselves apart from the competitors. In doing so, they will be future-ready to combat new threats from online-only institutions and global competitor infiltration of domestic markets.

At Opteamix, we have partnered with our BFSI clients to create disruptive and innovative technologies as part of their digital transformation journey. Digital Transformation is no longer just the adoption of social, digital, and mobile channels to expand markets, but a complete transformation in the enterprise to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and outperform competitors.

Robotic Process Automation and the Digital Transformation Journey

Robotic Process Automation is no longer an experimental technology; it is rapidly becoming an asset that is generating business value in every industry. Adopters of RPA are benefitting from cost reductions, error-free processes to improved regulatory compliance. Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) firms that have been the vanguard of the digital revolution have demonstrated that RPA has led to lower costs, improved processing time, and a reduction in reliance on external BPO providers for repetitive lower-skilled work.

TOP 5 APPLICATIONS OF RPA IN FINANCE

At Opteamix, we have been helping our customers achieve digital transformation with RPA in a variety of applications. However, there are common use cases that have been observed that would be beneficial to any firm looking to undertake its first steps toward RPA.

• Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable automation – Bots are configured to capture and interpret information from invoices, recognize patterns, and run business processes across multiple applications to execute activities, including data entry and validation of information.
• Underwriting Assessment – Business agility is increased by using bots that collect, assemble and present data for easy assessment of data by underwriters. When coupled with the speed at which these reports are generated, underwriters can review cases within an hour of receiving the information – offering a 40% – 50% reduction in processing time.
• End of Month Accounting – The financial monthly close and reporting process encompasses a number of tedious tasks and processes which include salary accounting, closing out sub-ledgers, importing and exporting data between software, and creating and delivering financial filings to regulatory bodies. The process involves many systems, departments, and individuals and requires posting data from sources such as Excel to these sub-ledgers, a tedious undertaking carried out seamlessly by bots.
• Credit Report Automation – By digitalizing credit management, banks reduce the risk of losing creditworthy clients to competitors as a result of slow approval processes. In addition, it complies with constantly evolving changes in regulations and governance, saving time and cutting cost by 50%. Our bots generate reports on command and present them to analysts in specified formats.
• Audit and Compliance – Gathering and analyzing financial and operational performance is a business-critical function, however, processing and delivering this information is a tedious task and is often prone to delays and worse, errors. Bots are programmed to carry out the task of checking and recalculating balance sheets for any discrepancies. Once completed, reports are generated and emailed to the users.

Future of Automation in BFSI

Initial RPA users focused on trying RPA out on pilot projects – ones that would help reveal value and process without radically altering business processes. Processes such as reconciliation, account opening, and data remediation were readily turned into automated processes as businesses were keen to cut down costs that were being borne by offshoring.

These early adopters of automation, armed with the knowledge of the value that RPA delivers, are now focused on the wider deployment of automation through the integration of RPA into their core systems – automating middle and back-office functions such as Risk Management, HR, and Compliance.

At Opteamix, we believe in using our experience to guide companies on the intricacies of digitalization. Our assessment program is designed to help our clients gather information about the unique characteristics of each process, to help drive the decision to automate. This approach aims to identify processes and sub-process activity steps that can be automated.