The banking industry these days is rapidly turning to new-age technologies to stay competitive in an increasingly saturated market. The sector has come a long way from traditional banking to digital, but now banks need to find ways to deliver the best possible user experience to their customers. This is where robotic process automation (RPA) comes in, playing an effective role in increasing efficiency and driving ROI. Considering industry reports, RPA is growing immensely and predicted to value US$2.9 billion industry by 2021, up from US$250 million in 2016.

The technology has become a powerful and effective tool for financial institutions in order to retain its competitive advantage in the race to digital transformation. The power of RPA has already been experienced by most large companies. For example, Facebook has employed RPA for featuring automated private messages when a visitor is browsing a brand's page. These messages are pre-programmed robots designed to respond to queries in Messenger without any human intervention.

RPA has the potential to digitize the front-end, business-critical and back-office processes of banks. It allows customers to get the answers they need more quickly while freeing up time for human employees. As the technology leverages intelligent software robots to automate mundane tasks like gleaning and input of data between portals, websites, internal applications and bank systems, it enables companies to garner productivity gains of 35-50 percent, offering greater capacity and agility.

How Does RPA Benefit Banks?

RPA is able to digitize the front, middle and back-offices of banks. The technology comes together with AI to create intelligent automation that can ease tedious, repetitive tasks. Today, RPA is automating common banking tasks, including opening emails and attachments; filling in forms; copying and pasting data, and then merging data from multiple places; following decisions and rules; and hauling out and reformatting data into reports or dashboards.

It also automates moving files and folders, and extracting structured data from documents; connecting systems through APIs; reading and writing to databases; making calculations; scraping data from the web; and logging into web/enterprise applications.

RPA also assists in cost savings as financial businesses seek to cut costs in a market where acquiring customers requires a lot of effort. In a research, the technology typically drives nearly 25-50 percent of savings, while enhancing the output metrics of applied functions.

Recently, the largest banks in Japan garnered a lot of attention from the world as it has deployed RPA to save labor costs and reap operational efficiency. Some other major banks like Axis Bank and Deutsche Bank have also implemented this technology to automate their business processes.

Thus, robotic process automation has proven to minimize employee workload, costs and other monotonous tasks. It also reduces the time it takes to complete manual tasks.

There are also a wide array of benefits RPA offers to banks if implemented effectively. The technology has several positive impacts on banks and its business models and by leveraging it, the sector can gain improvements in customer Service Level Agreements (SLAs), operational agility, reduced processing time, enhanced customer experience and increased regulatory compliance.