Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) solutions have been gaining traction across multiple industries. The pandemic prompted many enterprises to harness this disruptive technology to automate processes enabling more robust operations that support continuity of operations and even growth under adverse conditions. The banking and financial services sectors are also undergoing a transformation as AI and IPA solutions are proving highly effective in this space. Soon intelligent automation will be the new normal in banking and financial services as well as myriad other industries.
More than 80% of financial institutions use AI with over 70% of senior executives view this technology as crucial in the near future for optimizing operations. The banking sector also just happens to be an organizational setup where AI and IPA implementations can truly provide massive ROI and improvements.
How IPA is Enhancing Banking & Finance
IPA solutions harness both AI and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enabling the end-to-end automation of a wide range of use cases, particularly data-intensive, highly-repetitive tasks. Let’s look at a few ways this disruptive technology can be leveraged to optimize various processes.
1. Elevating Customer Experience
Every business’s main aim is to create a seamlessly integrated flow between back-end operation and front-end customer-facing operations. With banks increasingly engaging their customers via digital pathways, AI and IPA solutions can improve the automation of customer service query responses by both email and chat. Any major banking organization may receive anywhere between 1 million emails annually from its customers asking for clarifications, requesting favors, and lodging complaints.
Traditionally overseeing all of these emails proved time-consuming, expensive, and slow. The content of the emails was delegated to various teams with manually intensive, rule-based keyword classifications. This often created bottlenecks that directly impacted the bank’s ability to respond swiftly to its customers. During the global pandemic, there was even more pressure to respond to customers which were compounded by smaller teams or teams working remotely.
AI and IPA solutions that automate customer service query resolution were a game-changer optimizing turnaround times and costs along with the ability to scale as required. Delays were eliminated as turnaround time was reduced by 90% with much higher accuracy in resolving customer queries. Moreover, thanks to ML capabilities, such solutions continue to learn and improve over time.
Such solutions also serve to provide a higher degree of personalization to customers based on their unique requirements which raise customer satisfaction and improves customer retention.
2. Process Millions of Documents Efficiently with IPA
A major challenge for any bank can be the number of unstructured documents they have to deal with such as Know Your Customer (KYC) documents, credit agreements, policy documents, or trade agreements. With the help of AI capabilities such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) documents can be “read” and understood by the AI component of the IPA solution contextually. The IPA solution handles end-to-end automation feeding the processed output downstream. This boosts operational efficiency massively by eliminating the need for manual effort for this high-volume, repetitive, data-intensive task.
3. Improve Analytics for Actionable Insights
Banks are aiming to capitalize on the troves of data they have amassed over the years by applying Machine Learning (ML) into the mix. In this endeavor, they not only seek to tailor their own ML models but also demand that more robust ones be made available to them from vendors. These ML offerings are aimed at dealing with unstructured documents, defaults and forecast predictions, segmentation as well as classification. The speed of solutions ensures that actionable insights are available very quickly to various roles. The ability to learn and improve over time proves invaluable here too.
4. Speed Up Trade Transaction Processing with IPA
Emails are a huge part of handling the information for securities trade transactions and any bank that dealt with it is certainly faced with mountains of unstructured data. Extracting information from these emails without AI is complex requiring various trade felids and entity types. One transaction could take up to 10 minutes to process not to mention processing errors that could potentially crop up.
By using ML in a situation like this to identify all the needed fields and entity types the whole undertaking could be sped up as well as performed accurately. This solution could see up to a 95% increase in reducing the time taken to handle a trade transaction along with a 90% increase in accuracy rates. The IPA solution can feed the output of the AI’s processing downstream as required with RPA automating rule-based activities.
If you’d like to explore other aspects of AI you could read about Superior Customer Experience through Next-Generation AI and Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). Alternatively, you could also find out more about The Future – Artificial Intelligence Will Augment Human Employees.
If you’re interested in exploring how AI and IPA implementations can enhance your banking or financial services, the Rapid Acceleration Partners team would be glad to help. Our next-gen, AI-powered content intelligence platform RAPFlow enables full lifecycle AI orchestration on a single platform. When used in tandem with our RPA tool RAPBot, it provides end-to-end workflow automation capabilities that can be deployed in just weeks. You can even build your own use case and the platform can easily integrate with your existing systems. Book a demo to get a more detailed understanding of how our products can transform your business.
