RPA Robotic Process Automation and the Growth of the Banking Industry
The worldwide trend of market capitalization of the banking sector has started to balance after the decline from 2008, due to the economic crisis. However, up to 2010, it hadn’t gotten anywhere close to its 2007 peak of 8.7 trillion U.S. dollars, according to Statista. So the bank industry at global scale is not in a position to say no to assurances of enhanced growth.
If we look at the leading banks worldwide as of April 2017 by market capitalization according to Statista, the US, China, Canada and Australia take the lead. However, the entire industry is marked by motivation to implement changes that are likely to resuscitate the banking system.
According to the 2018 Banking Industry Outlook, modernization was among the most important IT trends for almost 25% of global banking respondents to the 2016 Ovum ICT Enterprise Insights survey. And, of course, automation and its consequent changes in bank workforce is a crucial aspect of modernization.
In fact, as stated in the above-mentioned survey, banks should consider rethinking their workforce strategy given how work is evolving — with increasing automation and greater diversity in the labor pool [added emphasis]. Robotic process automation seems to be at the intersection of two themes deemed crucial by the survey for the growth of the banking sector — technology management and reimagining the workforce.
It is worth to also take into account a fact mentioned by Yakidoo, that 34% of organizations in the bank industry still rely on manual processes. So the use of RPA in banking might be a technological resource that is necessary to fuel the industry, to bring it back to the pre-crisis ascending trend, and to warrant its long-term sustainable growth.
Where to use RPA in banking?
In the banking industry there seems to be a plethora of domains where robotic process automation brings promises of growth: finance and accounting, sourcing and procurement, regulatory and compliance, financial risk management, and cyber risk and resilience.
On the dimension of finance and accounting, for instance, RPA tools may be used to calculate asset depreciation, to validate sales orders, or to maintain accounting master data. Robotic Process Automation also has the capacity to examine system logs to identify suspicious or illegal activity, thereby making a significant contribution to cyber risk management. The execution of timeliness, accuracy and comprehensiveness checks, or the performance of hasty remedy actions when required, are cases of RPA use to manage financial risks.
