BAI Banking Strategies: President of Banking and Financial Services at Cognizant Says Intelligent Process Automation can Help Banks Drive Operational Process Improvements in Wealth Management, Investment Banking and Mortgage Origination

“Robotic process automation (RPA) is an exciting development for banking and financial services companies,” writes Prasad Chintamaneni. “This technology shifts repetitive operations, such as checking, inputting, searching and collating information, from humans to software tools. By interacting with multiple applications at the software presentation layer or user interface and processes, RPA mimics the steps that humans would take, reducing expenses and errors in the process.” Excerpts:

“Intelligent process automation, or IPA, builds on RPA by both freeing people to take on higher value work and enabling them to work smarter using process data analysis. Results of our recent survey of senior business and technology decision-makers from across banking and financial services sectors suggest IPA will be welcome in many institutions. Nearly half of respondents reported at least 10% revenue growth driven by process-aligned analytics over the past year. And, nearly three out of four banks expect to see similar growth in the next three to five years.

By integrating IPA, banks can potentially reduce the time, effort and cost of operations and processing, while taking advantage of meaningful insights from automation-generated data. We expect IPA to deliver performance improvements including: reduced error rates; better management of repeatable tasks; improved standardization of process flow; frictionless straight-through processing; and less reliance on multiple systems.

Banks can implement IPA into their day-to-day operations by understanding business needs, identifying processes that can especially benefit from IPA, and making process improvements or changes. Three activities in particular provide good examples of this potential: wealth management, investment banking and mortgage services.

Some of the characteristics to consider when identifying which processes are candidates for IPA include completion time, cost, error rate, data adequacy, degree of intelligence (artificial or human), and optimal process.”

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