Banking processes at Indian banks have been, in certain cases revolutionary, yet in others, it has been mundane and tardy. With the olden and golden banks on the cusp of losing customers to neo banks and non-financial entities who are attempting to strike gold in the payments domain, it is mandatory that banks try to understand and complete a thorough gap analysis on what needs to be rectified, what needs to be changed and what needs to be trashed and replaced.
There has been a lot of discussion regarding cognitive technology and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic process automation (RPA) are connecting to remove mundane processes and improve the workflow around processes that depend on a lot of unstructured and structured data.
This can be considered a gold mine for banks to try and understand. With the immense amount of data that is currently available to the bank, it is important to collect strategic insights on the actionable data and insights on the best action or route to take for banking processes, usually connected with RPA. When RPA and AI meet, it welcomes your organisation into the finest hour of its technological advancement!
Cognitive Intelligence: The new in-demand kid on the block
The reason why cognitive intelligence is presently in high demand is due to the high expectations that customers demand from banks. Real-time solutions are a thing of the past. Customers currently want solutions to futuristic problems. Insights to solving such riveting problems can be obtained by understanding the customer’s behavior and by analysing the customer’s touchpoints across various platforms and channels. The interesting point is that data is available in terabytes and in magnanimous quantities. Banks need to focus on leveraging the data to perform predictive analysis on futuristic data models about unique customers. Ultimately obtaining quality insights is the final objective.
Where Banks are getting busted:
Currently, banking processes are often faced with long customer on-boarding processes and paperwork processes, which ultimately take the life out of the customer. In the yesteryears, these slow processes didn’t matter to the extent to which it matters right now. However, customers at banks are showing similar behavioural patterns as to how they do it at with retail organisations. One unsatisfactory episode with the bank can lead to the customer joining a rival bank or non-financial entity for their needs. With such a competitive banking landscape, such a scenario is unacceptable for any bank and RPA can be the answer to that.
The Chasm and the Potential
The involvement of RPA comes into the first stage of a customer’s touchpoint with the organisation, i.e. customer on-boarding process for banks. For banks, it is the first opportunity to win the customer over. However, the on-boarding process requires a fast and seamless process where the entire process is automated. According to research, 90 percent of customers left the on-boarding process midway.
Around 42 percent of them felt that the terms and conditions and processing time were too long. The negative nature of the statistic highlights the importance of cognitive intelligence where RPA can speed up the process and AI can be used to understand each unique customer and can study them based on structured and unstructured data that is collected across various platforms.
First Step towards Cognitive Excellence: A Taskforce
Now, it should also be stated that through the limited observation of process automation at banks, the results have been a little skewed. While some banks have seen immediate results with RPA, some haven’t due to their RPA implementation in the wrong places. However, with automation on manual and mundane processes and by bringing up a virtual workforce, the results could be skyrocketing if implemented correctly. Therefore, there needs to be a cognitive intelligence taskforce within banks that aims at observing and highlighting issues that when corrected project a completely new picture for the customer. This provides banks with the direction that they need to proceed with the available technology and data.
Conclusion
Cognitive technology with RPA and AI have high revenue projections for 2019, with experts stating that billions could be saved and efficiency could reach an all new high. This, however, depends on the direction that banks take in 2019. Cognitive intelligence and sciences such as RPA and AI could drive the innovations that banks, so desperately want to add to their kit, and customers so badly expect from their bank. It’s time for banks to debate, deliberate and change.
(Views expressed above are the personal opinion of Ramesh Muniyandi, Practice Head, RPA, Banking, and Financial Services at Aspire Systems.)
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