RPA and its applications in banking sector

Robotic Process Automation although is not a very old term but it has its roots in process automation which has been around since quite some time. Process automation also has its roots in process management and myself being in business process management field for quite some time now (10 years to be precise) can clearly understand how things have evolved from business process management to process automation to RPA.

RPA today a buzz word in the market and is touching almost every industry vertical, BFSI finds RPA very relevant in various business types may it be Retail, Invoice Finance or Dispute handling. 

For the scope of this blog I would discuss how RPA is influencing some of the manual processes

•  Customer Onboarding : Although globally, retail banking is moving towards digital customer onboarding and making the process paperless, there are still many areas where a document is submitted b customer or a handfilled form is submitted by customer which needs to be processed manually by a human and the data is fed into the system. This is where RPA is helping banks in a big way as the tasks which was done by humans is now being automated and robots are able to do such taks by reading the hand written forms or by scanning and evaluating the documents submitted by prospective customers. For examples documents submitted by individuals can be scanned and ots can verify if these documents are as per the compliance needs
• Processing claims : Claim processing is often one of the most human intensive process as it requires human intervention at various levels. However there are many subprocess in the entire claims journey where humans are being replaced by bots. For example, customers are often required to submit various third party documents such as third party inspection certificates, id proofs, etc. Bots are now processing the documents and entering the values on behalf on humans 
• KYC and Due diligence: KYC often requires customers submit their identification documents and banks processing these documents to ensure that they have enough data to make the customer KYC compliant. KYC is one area where RPA is making big changes buy allowing banks to process thousands of records parallely and thus becoming more independent of the human workforce

These are some of the major areas where RPA is helping banks and financial institutions by helping them reduce the dependency on workforce and thus giving them ability to scale up  the operations and reduce processing time for various processes.