IBS Journal May 2017


for example, is designed to answer questions from Swedbank’s online customers, while simulating a human conversational style, and is also planned for roll-out across its subsidiaries in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.


2. Measuring impact:


This is where it gets a little trickier. No matter how innovative the approach, or how interesting the proposition, there must be a measurable impact. There is essentially a dual axis that the impact gets measured by: Robotics driven initiatives may either drive costs down (efficiency) or improve service quality, convenience, and the accuracy levels (effectiveness) or both.


The benefits of RPA could essentially be structured in five broad metrics: Cost reduction, accuracy improvement, productivity and scalability enhancement, quality assurance and risk mitigation. Here are a few examples of AI and robotics applications, and the kind of measures that banks consider when evaluating impact:


• Improvement in efficiency: Typical examples here are the automation of operational, mundane activities. In essence, this is to do with reporting, reconciliation, data remediation and such activities. The direct impact here is to eliminate manual intervention, with an automated approach. Cost drivers are direct measures, e.g. back office mortgage processing.


• Increase in effectiveness: Accuracy of risk and compliance monitoring, predictive analytics driven collections, are examples where the impact is more on ‘opportunity savings’ and enhanced revenue via the quality of the process, driven by RPA.


• Driving both efficiency & effectiveness: These are areas that banks target improved customer experience, through higher quality interactions while increasing the degree of automation. Examples are related to account origination, lending, investment advisory and customer service. Increases in throughput and improvements in returns are standard measures here.


3. The RPA marketplace and choosing your partner:


The fundamental shift in the approach to driving RPA- based efficiency is not in re-engineering the processes,


but an automation of the mechanical processes, without changing or replacing the existing application infrastructure. The bank must have a point of view on the objective to be addressed, the volume and scale of automation planned, and most importantly the value and impact that comes of the initiative. Key here is establishing a Centre of Excellence to support a certain line of business, succeeding in a proof of concept, and then pushing this forward on a bank-wide basis with standardised security and governance principles.


Automation Anywhere, Kofax, Blueprism, Workfusion, Softomotive, UiPath, Redwood, Arago, Celaton, Ignio, Contextor, Open Connect, Pega Systems, Kryon, NICE, Verint – these are some of the leading players in the RPA space. Pega’s recent acquisition of OpenSpan and ISG’s takeover of Alsbridge are reflective of increased traction in the market. That Blueprism could generate an investor confidence of boosting its valuation 4x within 10 months of listing, is also an indication of the direction in which the industry is moving. Solution providers in the universal and core banking space such as Edgeverve (Infosys) and Infrasoft are also making waves in the RPA space.


The experience of and support from the supplier or implementation partner is a key success factor. Skilled resources with an ability to drive the primary value proposition with innovative design, and


technical expertise and their availability in the markets of deployment play an important role in the choice of the supplier and partner.


A word of caution as we move into the era of robotics and automation. These are relatively unchartered territories and so new types of risks emerge. The challenges are more related to compliance, cyber security, data privacy, controls and governance. It is natural, then, that banks who select suppliers offering a better governance framework to test and control, and apply advance analytics to boost pattern recognition and have well established used cases, will be better-off than their peers.


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