Today’s financial sector has undergone significant changes due to enhanced fintech, changes in customer requirements and expectations, and a surge in the need for personalized customer experience. Financial services providers must adopt and leverage tools to automate processes in the financial sector, where competitors are already launching disruptive technologies to cater to customers’ changing needs and build strong customer relationships. Under such circumstances, IPA tools can create intelligent workflows to enhance productivity and efficiency and ensure seamless customer journeys.
Intelligent automation in financial sector
Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is the term used to describe the integration of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and associated emerging technologies, such as Computer Vision, Cognitive Automation, and Machine Learning (ML).
Managing financial and accounting operations can be difficult and time-consuming in some cases as well as complicated. As a precautionary measure, manual errors should be reduced to avoid potential financial disasters. IPA can assist firms in automating end-to-end financial operations by merging AI with RPA thereby enhancing efficiency, reducing error possibilities, and freeing personnel to work higher-value jobs. Using cutting-edge ML models, advanced intelligent automation can perform cognitive activities like interpreting language, taking part in chats and conversations, understanding unstructured data, and rendering complex decisions.
Deployment of IPAs in the financial sector can automate processes and workflows, reduce costs, and reduce manual work. Combined, all these tasks can strengthen customer engagement and ensure satisfaction which is paramount in maintaining customer relationships, especially in a customer-centric sector like finance.
IPA transforming financial sector
With the help of new technologies and more automation, finance professionals can change how they perform their day-to-day jobs. In the financial sector, hundreds of jobs demand employees’ detailed attention, such as filing, data entry, or replying to everyday emails. Even though all of these operations are crucial to running an organization, they can be monotonous, time-consuming, and ultimately cause a delay in extending customer support. When it comes to automating repetitive and transactional tasks, the main goal of a financial team is to get rid of the need for human intervention. In this way, the finance team can spend more time advising the company on its long-term goals. With the development of IPA tools, businesses now have the opportunity to automate many of these monotonous jobs, freeing up staff members to engage with customers more efficiently. Across financial institutions, IPAs can help drive productivity by processing a wide range of structured and unstructured data, automating manual tasks, and providing personalized customer support.
Enhanced customer service
Within the financial sector, customer satisfaction depends on several factors, including a bank’s assistance, performance, punctuality, and operational efficiency.
Financial services providers must manage customer information in the form of unstructured data from multiple sources, and processing it manually takes a lot of time. Email communications and social media posts are also instances of unstructured data, as are PDFs of bank records or scanned handwritten documents. With proper training, IPAs can automatically extract meaningful information from various sources and categorize it accurately by eliminating manual errors. This helps in streamlining banking processes and improving customer service.
Other benefits of IPA
Customer Onboarding: IPAs can accelerate the onboarding process and reduce turnaround time to minutes. It can reduce the time taken for a customer’s KYC collection and verification to extract relevant data from a customer’s documents quickly and accurately. IPAs are equipped to perform extensive background checks and assess risks to ensure a secure and hassle-free customer experience. It can also detect suspicious activities and transaction errors and reduce variations in recording data. This complete audit trail helps in improving outcomes and, as a result, customer experience.
Quicker resolution: Customers expect quicker resolution of issues in every sector of the financial industry. Faster processing time and temporary transactions are some of the critical requirements in today’s fast-paced world. Generally, customers want to remain updated about their application or transaction status without repeatedly interacting with a bank agent. As per reports, in recent years, banks have seen a 10% to 20% decline in foot traffic. By leveraging IPAs, banks can provide seamless and quick solutions to customer queries and offer a customer-friendly banking experience.
Streamlined Processes: IPAs can reduce the need for data entry by extracting and categorizing data from texts with minimal human inspection. Compared to the slow speed of human review, this can reduce the time required for new customer intake, claim checks, and other document-based operations. Quicker review results in enhanced service, which helps in strengthening customer relationships.
Automation: Reporting, alerting, migration, validation, and computation – each of these processes can be automated efficiently using IPA. A software bot is built to execute repetitive operations at a significantly faster and error-free pace. With the ability to monitor and assess compliance, IPA bots’ operations make it possible to automate such processes and increase control. This increases speed and accuracy and helps in building long-lasting customer relationships.
Faster, deeper, and more accurate information
IPA helps financial services providers to manage and fulfill the increased need for insights, reporting, and analysis, as well as the rising volume and complexity of data required in near real-time from key stakeholders.
Procedures that don’t add value take a lot of time, leaving little time for analysis. As a routine, IPAs can automate manual tasks, enabling finance teams to focus on tasks that add value, such as scenario planning, risk assessments, performance evaluations, and predictive modelling.
As digital technologies make banking more automated, manually collecting, combining, checking, and formatting data will no longer be necessary. Organizations within the financial sector will use automation and data mining to make it easier to see and keep track of data about planning, delivery, and results. New insights will let teams gather timely data to monitor velocity, deployment, and customer response, creating a decision-making and course-correction loop.
