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This point of view article was originally published on Forbes, authored by Nitin Rakesh, CEO and Executive Director, Mphasis.
For centuries, banks demonstrated expertise in keeping, lending and saving money. In return, customers followed a bank's regulations. This included how banks stipulated interest rates for lending, identified creditworthy cohorts and facilitated banking transactions.
Fast-forward to 2020, and banks are now viewed under the same lens as customer-facing organizations like movie theatres, restaurants and hotels. Well, OK — that may be a bit of an exaggeration. But my point is that advanced technology, customer demand and fintech disruptions have all dramatically changed what constitutes banking and how digital customers expect it to be.
Today, customers want to be met, courted and fulfilled through any organization that wants to establish a relationship with them. They also expect to be consulted, spoken to and befriended in times, places and situations of their choice.
Banks Up Their Game by Roping In Intelligent Automation
As a result, it's not enough for banks to only be available when and where customers require these organizations. Banks also need to ensure data safety, customized solutions and the intimacy and satisfaction of an in-person meeting on every channel online.
One of the ways in which the banking sector is meeting this ask is by adopting new technologies, especially those that enable intelligent automation (IA). According to a 2019 report, nearly 85%[1] of banks have already adopted intelligent automation to expedite several core functions.
IA consists mainly of the deployment of robotic process automation and artificial intelligence solutions. It enables a bank to acquire the agility and 24/7 access of fintech firms without losing any of its gravitas. But some banks are pushing the envelope further. Let us have a closer look.
Take Bank of America's Erica[2]. Functionally a lot like Siri or Alexa, BoA's artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant debuted in early 2018 to great acclaim, amassing 1 million users in its first two months. At first, its intended mandate was fairly simple: to help customers check balances, serve as a reminder for bill payments and provide responses to banking-related queries.
Intelligent Insights Improve CX
Within a year, its user base grew exponentially to cross the 7 million mark. But what happened soon after is especially noteworthy.
In November 2018, the bank expanded the virtual assistant's capabilities to include insights. It meant that not only did customers accessing Erica gain reliable information on the go, but they also acquired highly customized recommendations based on their banking behavior on how to manage their money better. It included receiving warnings about a potential increase in recurring charges, notifications about seasonal variations in utility bills and new customer-led features over how much they may want to curtail daily expenses. The result? BoA saw its user base jump from 7 to 10 million within a few months.
Freeing Up Bank Teams For Higher-Value Functions
Similarly, Deutsche Bank saw substantial returns on investment when it embarked upon a comprehensive digital transformation journey where it deployed software to introduce both attended robotic process automation and unattended intelligent automation.
For its unattended intelligent automation, the bank deployed[3] a learning automation platform. The platform helped it seamlessly integrate its own systems with third-party systems for time and cost savings. The bank's teams used the platform's cognitive automation technology to perform several tasks quickly and effortlessly, including halving the time it used to take to screen clients as a part of the bank's know-your-customer process.
The bank also used the intelligent automation platform to expedite its document custody procedures. Consider, for example, the laborious paperwork that is typically required to refinance homes. Deutsche Bank's intelligent automation software helped it to leverage both optical character recognition (or OCR) and scanning technologies to automate data harvesting from scores of documents, helping the bank save millions of euros in costs while freeing up its teams to focus on higher-value functions.
As the world forges ahead with transformations in every sphere of life, banks are setting themselves up for continued relevance. While the first wave of automation improved some of the banks' basic functions by replacing machine-based learning for repetitive tasks, the current wave will see far more sophisticated and intelligent applications of automation taking place across processes, including conversational banking. Firms that understand and implement IA in time can be certain of sustained success, while those that haven't must choose relevant automation tools to help them stay ahead of evolving customer expectations.
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