RPA in Finance: The Complete Guide

Let’s face it, America; robots are here to stay. 

Many people fear robots and all things robotic. It’s nothing new; the fear of robots taking over human life goes back at least 100 years. But something is becoming more and more important as the 21st century rolls on… 

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Robots are good for business. Especially for finance. 

You might have heard about RPA in finance; you might only know robots from science fiction movies. It doesn’t matter. The fact is that automation is an affordable option that’s simple, easy to implement, and highly flexible. 

Whether you’re afraid of robots or wholeheartedly embracing the future, this article will help you understand robotics in finance and accounting. 

What is RPA?

RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation. It refers to the automation of specific repetitive tasks across platforms. It, in effect, lets you set up certain tasks like dominos for you to knock down all in one push. 

And what does that mean for you? It means that you can improve your productivity by up to 90 percent and compliance up to 92%. 

RPA has been used in everything from convenience stores to healthcare. Its benefits aren’t limited to productivity. It’s also able to increase employee morale and save your money. 

Now to understand how RPA can be used in the financial sector, let’s take a look at some use cases. 

How RPA in Banking can be applied

We can talk about RPA in accounting all day, but you won’t truly learn about it until you look at use cases. Here are some ways that companies have chosen to use process automation that you can use as well. 

Sorting Emails 

Everyone knows how annoying emails can be, especially when you’re getting a lot of them on several accounts. 

A bot can easily open up as many accounts as they need, open up the emails, save attachments, and forward the email out to whoever it needs to go to.

Order Tracking 

A bot set to track orders might open up an “orders tracking” file, copy and paste links to any new documents into that file, copy the email date (that the email robot dealt with), and paste the date and address into the file and save the whole ordeal. 

These are some general ways that you can use RPA to win back time and save money.

Customer Verification

Customer onboarding and verification can be one of the essential jobs for financial process automation. By making use of character recognition, your RPA will make collecting information about your clients easy. If everything is approved, your RPA can easily enter their information into their database. 

Account Opening 

Similar to customer verification, the process of opening an account can be tedious. Using an RPA can make account opening a direct and straightforward process that both you and your customers will appreciate. 

Fraudulent Activity

Having a bot that can sort through and deal with suspicious activity reports will save you a lot of time. Usually, a compliance officer will have to sift through many suspicious activity reports and fill out the relevant details; a task that takes a long time simply due to repetition is the perfect task to delegate to a bot. 

Loan Processing

Loan processing is, again, another job that requires paperwork. (Are you noticing a pattern here?) It usually consists of extracting data from many files and assessing whether someone should get a loan. 

If you’ve ever found yourself slammed with loan applications, you may want to consider RPA services for accounting. This one’s a bit more complicated, and you may be dealing with many different file formats. To combat this, you have options in machine learning and intelligent automation.

Machine learning refers to processes by which your bot can improve cognition, learning from data in front of it, and growing with experience. This would enable bots to delegate themselves tasks without time-wasting human intervention.

Soon enough, you can have an AI workforce managing your money lending app. 

Though you’re starting to notice patterns, let’s cover all of our bases and look at some more robotic process automation use cases in banking. 

Mortgages 

Just like processing loans, the process of mortgage lending can waste you lots of time. You can easily automize document processing, loan initiation, and quality control. 

Automizing your digital mortgage platform can be one of the most important RPA services for accounting. 

Credit Cards

Something you’re no doubt familiar with within the financial sector is processing credit cards. You often have to wade through many different walls of verification steps to get things done. But just like mortgages, this can be made very easy with automation. 

Tax Reporting 

This is another similar one to the three above, but we might as well knock them all out in a row (just like your RPA would). Whether dealing with the financial sector or not, the reporting of taxes is always annoying. 

And maybe things aren’t so similar after all.

As part of the financial sector, you have an advantage. Your RPA is already trained to deal with financial concerns, which will make filing taxes (a financial issue, duh) a breeze. 

As you can see, RPA in banking use cases shows how much time can be saved through robotics you time because it means that your skilled employees can get to work in tasks that demand their skills. 

Business Trips

Business trips are something that many people forget come with their own sets of paperwork. A simple trip can rack up many different bills, and it’s best to have a system to take care of all of that. 

Using an RPA for business trips makes it easy for you to process receipts and invoices. 

Invoice Automation

Sources show that most finance teams spend at least five days a month on invoice management. This is yet another case where automation can save a lot of time. 

But that’s not all there is to think about.

Another cool thing about Invoice Automation is that just like loan processing, a good RPA will be able to learn and draw data from many different types of documents and create services rendered invoice templates. 

Financial Planning

That’s right; you can use robots to help predict the future. By automating a process to track trends in the present and past, you can accurately predict future expenses. 

This will work financially for you (it’s always nice to refine your long-term plan). It will also take a lot of stress off your workers.  

RPA can be used for these things and many more, including accounts payable, payroll, and employee on onboarding. Read also: Guide on Automated Payroll System Development

Real Use Cases for 2021 

Many people have taken to using RPA in 2021. Now that you know some of the potential uses for RPA, let’s take a look at some RPA case studies in banking. You can take this case study, and the examples of these companies, and implement them on your own to great effect. 

Indonesia’s Bank Mega 

Due to COVID-19, Indonesia’s Bank Mega opted to digitize a large part of their workforce. 

One of the most critical improvements they saw was in their call center. They reported that agents used to spend up to seven minutes per call on 135,000 calls a month.

Similar to one of the use cases above, they noticed that it became much easier to validate identification and check credit card applications. They were able to set their standards much higher. 

But not only that. 

They also found that they were saving lots of time. A verification check used to take them up to four hours. Now it’s knocked out in five minutes or less. 

They started using RPA because of COVID and found that robotics helped them through. The automatization of certain parts of their workforce made contactless operations a breeze. 

If you want to look at a case of RPA success in the financial sector, look no further than Indonesia’s Bank Mega. 

KB Kookmin Bank

The KB Kookmin Bank is Korea’s largest bank. Recently, they automated 183 of their services to significant effect. 

KB Kookmin Bank found that the automation of certain processes helped expand their direct business. With new optical character recognition technology, customers are now able to submit documents for loan processes without having to visit a physical bank. This is great for COVID safety, as well as to streamline banking in the future. 

The KB Kookmin Bank estimated that they saved up to 1.25 million working hours. They vastly improved their efficiency as well as customer satisfaction. 

KB Kookmin Bank proves that RPA can help everybody involved in the process of banking.  

As you can see, RPA is very relevant in the contemporary finance sector. Now that you’ve looked at several robotic process automation cases in finance, the final step is to put it into use. 

Steps to Deploy RPA in Banking and Finance  

Now that you know all of the great benefits of automation, you must be itching to get started. But what’s the best way to fire up automation for your business? 

Discover and Assess

Do some research on your own company and analyze your findings. Look at all of the functions your company performs and ask yourself a question — which of these would benefit from RPA implementation?  

Make a list for yourself of all the main operational issues that could be solved by using RPA. Then assess their impact and feasibility. 

You don’t need to do this alone; feel free to employ any amount of creativity. Poll your workers and ask them what their issues are to understand better where you can add RPA. 

Make a Business Use Case and Evaluate

Now that you’ve read 12 business use cases, you indeed have some ideas about which can apply to you. Take some time to make your use cases. Then take what you’ve learned about use cases and your company, and calculate the cost component and efficiency gains that RPA will bring to your company.

You can also compare RPA benefits based on their time, resource utilization, and efforts. You’re going to want to do some research on RPA requirements to make sure you can implement robotics in your business. 

Prepare a Comprehensive Strategy

Now it’s time to bring all of that information together. Based on what your company needs, pick an operating model and workforce for your RPA needs. Cater this to your own company as much as you can so you can implement RPA seamlessly. 

For seamless implementation, we recommend hiring a financial development software service. In order to bring a robotic workforce on, you’re going to need a partner for end-to-end performance inclusive of planning, execution, and support. Our own FinTech software development services is one of the best in the industry. 

Implement the System

Once everything else has been done, it’s time to get your robotic workforce working. In this stage, you’ll put your first bots to operate the benefits they bring. 

From here, you’ll educate any of your stakeholders about your new robotic workforce and what benefits they’ll bring. Then you can figure out your demand for the future. Finally, you’ll be ready to adapt to future changes and manage a change in staff. 

Or.

The overall burden can be relieved if you outsource product development to a software development company, like Relevant. We know a thing or two about building products from scratch as well as upgrading existent systems.

Automate Your Workforce  

So now you know what RPA is, learned how RPA is used in finance, saw some potential uses for RPA, read some 2021 RPA banking use cases, and even learned how to implement it into your business. Nothing is stopping you from enhancing your workforce by adding bots to your business army.  

What will you do with all of this information about RPA in finance? How will you use the extra time, the extra money, the extra employee enthusiasm? Some people may be scared of AI and robotic workforces, but the fact of the matter is, they can help you unleash your creative business potential. 

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