Financial institutions’ interest in robotic process automation (RPA) has increased with the improving technology.

The global RPA and hyper-automation market size will grow to $26 billion by 2027 from $9.2 billion in 2022, according to a recent report from research firm Markets and Markets.

RPA can help banks save on labor costs and improve operational efficiencies. However, misconceptions persist about RPA’s capabilities, and implementing the tools can be challenging.

Bank Automation News recently spoke to Joseariel Gomez Ortigoza, chief executive at RPA-as-a-Service provider Shastic, and Desiree Hackett, consumer loan manager at Atlanta Postal Credit Union, to get their take on best practices.

Bank Automation News: What do credit unions and banks get wrong about RPA?

Gomez: They have an overall misconception of the capabilities of RPA. Generic RPA solutions were not specifically designed for financial institutions. They require a lot of technical resources to adapt them for typical financial business processes, and they are not well-suited to handle tasks that require an understanding of the entire context of an account, a process, a member or a customer, as opposed to performing simple individual actions.

Hackett: What credit unions get wrong about RPAs is that they often brush off the full functionality of it. We are in the era of instant gratification and if you aren’t at the forefront of the technology to provide that, you are missing out on opportunities. Communication with members with today’s technology has become more simplified and there are those that are resistant to change. RPAs aren’t a complete replacement for humans, but are stepping stones to a faster turnaround time.

BAN: What misconceptions do people in the financial services industry have about automation?

Gomez: When people hear “automation,” many instinctively think of “getting rid of jobs.” However, at its best, automation gets rid of repetitive work, not jobs. Automation augments your team’s capabilities, which makes their work more productive and their jobs more rewarding.

It cuts through the most tedious, mind-numbing parts of financial services work: moving data between legacy systems, performing repetitive follow-ups, collecting documents, etc. Intelligent process automation takes care of these tasks, allowing knowledge workers to focus on more fulfilling and rewarding work.

Hackett: The biggest misconception is that automation will cause a breakdown in service because it begs the question, “Can it really do what we as humans can do?” You must trust that what you are having the RPA do will be at the same level of service as if it were human.

BAN: What are some best practices for implementing RPA at the credit union and bank level?

Gomez: It’s best to start by mapping, step by step, a specific financial business process you are interested in streamlining. Once you understand the different steps and multiple systems involved in the process, you can begin identifying the individual steps that you wish to delegate to automation. Then it’s all about finding the right tool for the job.

We learned early on that for financial institutions to remove manual bottlenecks across different processes they require more than what traditional RPA can offer. In financial services, every account and every transaction is different in its own unique way. Financial institutions must be able to process massive amounts of data and react to them in real time.

Removing the biggest bottlenecks most institutions face each day requires a combination of RPA with a big data layer — for personalization and context — and artificial intelligence to drive automated actions tailored to each individual process. RPA that uses artificial intelligence can easily process inhuman amounts of data to make tailored decisions and improve its processing with each data point.

Hackett: The best advice that I can give on best practices is to ensure you do a full analysis of where disconnects are with touch points in your company. Identify what you spend a large amount of time obtaining and doing and focus your RPAs around those areas. It doesn’t necessarily change across different business units because you are all on the same wavelength, simplifying communication. The only thing that would change is what RPA would be sent out for each individual department.

BAN: How do you identify and avoid over-automation?

Gomez: As you map your individual financial processes, it’s important to clearly separate repetitive tasks that are well-suited for intelligent process automation from tasks that require complex situational awareness and are best suited for human knowledge workers.

In addition, whether your goal is to maximize profits or your customer experience, there are several points in every individual process where it’s key to maintain control over the execution path and have the ability to guide automation towards the best path of action considering our specific business policies and the needs of our members and customers. Over-automation does not just affect the back office. An over-reliance on customer-facing automation can be extremely alienating to members and customers.

Hackett: Over-automation is not something easily recognizable and often identified after implementation. It may have seemed like a good idea to execute a specific RPA, however, if you have low responses on those RPAs or numerous questions every time it executes, it may be time to re-evaluate if it is truly an RPA you want to have activated. Over-communication can occur if there are too many RPAs that trigger at numerous points in the application process. Keep it simple.

Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022, taking place Sept. 19-20 in Seattle, is a crucial event on automation and automation technology in banking. Early registration ends Friday, Aug. 5. Learn more and register for Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022.