Implementing robotic process automation can result in big savings for financial service institutions.
Apart from cost savings and fast implementation time, institutions can reduce the turnaround time to complete a process significantly, with early indicators pointing to a reduction of turnaround time by 50% to 90%.
An IDC Financial Insights report titled “Robotic Process Automation in Asia/Pacific Financial Services: Key Learnings from 10 Early Adopters” identifies the top early adopters of robotic process automation (RPA) as seen in Asia/ Pacific (excluding Japan) banks and insurance companies.
The report highlights a list of financial services institutions (FSIs) such as ANZ Bank, DBS Bank, OCBC Bank, UOB, ICICI Bank, ICICI Lombard, and Prudential Life Assurance; and their early success in adopting Robotic Process Automation (RPA) initiatives. The report also details an early assessment of the benefits and drawbacks of RPA that banking and financial service institutions need to consider ensuring RPA deployments are done right and deliver quickly on their promise.
Michael Araneta, associate vice-president of IDC Financial Insights Asia/Pacific, says: “Aside from the 10 early adopters, we note of many more implementations at the pilot stage in 2018, with other FSIs fervently waiting to take their first step. We expect continued growth in the next two to three years as more institutions appreciate the overall quick-to-realize benefits, more use cases are presented in the market, and better and advanced product propositions are made available by RPA vendors.”
The reports finds that FSIs can achieve costs savings in the range of 30% to 60%. However, actual numbers would ultimately vary based on the cost base, the market, the business process itself, the investments needed to support RPA, and so forth.
The implementation time required for RPSs is also short, usually ranging from six to 12 weeks, and the initial investment can be recovered in anything between 10 months and two years.
The majority of RPA deployments until now are at the basic level of automation.
“The real game changer for FSIs will be the use of cognitive RPA, where cognitive technologies and advanced analytics are combined with RPA,” says Sneha Kapoor, senior research manager at IDC Asia Pacific. “With its ability to deal with data from multiple and disparate sources, cognitive RPA can deliver by designing and launching on-demand, usage-based products that align with current market expectations.”
Next-generation security will also gain attention, as these systems can monitor activity in real time and capture “bad actor” transactions even if they are outside of the rules-based or heuristic capabilities of other fraud prevention systems.