Asia Financial Firms Explore Robotic Process Automation

In a report, IDC Financial Insights, which assists financial services and technology companies, found that institutions using RPA are able to reduce turnaround time to complete a process by between 50 and 90 percent.

Michael Araneta, associate vice president of IDC Financial Insights for APAC, said in a statement that many other financial services institutions are at the pilot stage. “We expect continued growth in the next two to three years as more institutions appreciate the overall quick-to-realize benefits, more user cases are presented in the market, and better and advanced product propositions are made available by RPA vendors,” he added.

IDC recently published its report, “Robotic Process Automation in Asia/Pacific Financial Services: Key Learnings from 10 Early Adopters,” which highlights the success that several financial institutions in APAC excluding Japan have had in adopting RPA initiatives.

It also covers the early assessment of the benefits and drawbacks of RPA that banking and financial services institutions need to consider before deploying RPA.

The 10 financial services institutions included in the report are ANZ Bank, DBS Bank, OCBC Bank, UOB, ICICI Bank, ICICI Lombard, Prudential Life Assurance, CIMB Bank, Axis Bank and one of the top four Thai banks.

Based on IDC research, institutions can recover their initial RPA investment in 10 months to two years.

Sneha Kapoor, senior research manager at IDC Asia Pacific, tells WatersTechnology that RPA, especially in the first stages, is best deployed in business processes that are standardized, rules-based and high-volume, and could be used for proofs-of-concepts.

“In the short term, the focus should be on delivering efficiency and accuracy in operations rather than on creating and customizing products. Trying to automate anything and everything initially can lead to failed developments,” she says.

One of the primary limitations of RPA is the failure to identify relevant processes to automate. Only a few processes can be automated in their present state—most have to be redesigned to make them suitable for automation.

Also, network and server latency can become critical bottlenecks for institutions building a virtual workforce.

Another point to note is that with automation, institutions run the risk of losing the knowledge required to perform a process or task. This is particularly true in the case of unplanned events, where manual intervention might be required for business continuity, Kapoor adds.

IDC Financial Insights identified that some of the processes financial institutions in APAC are automating include account management, finance and human resources, transactions, loans, performance reporting and insurance. “Of late, we have seen investments in automating processes like loan processing, mortgage processing, and financial reporting. For instance, it is mostly in policy administration and servicing and claim payment processing,” Kapoor says.

In terms of cognitive RPA, she says this can be in the form of robo-advisors, chatbots, robo claims handlers, and virtual insurance agents that are self-learning and self-adapting, offering intelligent assistance and advisory services.

Using cognitive RPA, financial services institutions can improve the onboarding experience across various channels. It can also speed up the decision-making process, she adds.