What’s the missing key to exceptional operational efficiency?

It’s been well over a year since the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States, drastically altering banks’ employees’ and customers’ day-to-day lives. With the transition to remote work, the growing need for digital transformation and process automation was evident as employees shifted quickly to operate in a socially distant environment.

In the new normal, employees lost the ability to perform long-standing, manual processes, such as generating letters in the office or updating customer accounts. It also resulted in the inability of account holders to perform traditional in-person interactions, such as visiting a local branch to open accounts or file a dispute for a fraudulent transaction. To adjust, banks had to, and continue to, search for digitally transformative solutions to meet their changing needs.

Cloud-based solutions that offer workflow management and robotic process automation (RPA) are reported as top priorities in 2021 by Gartner, a leading analyst firm for banking technology solutions. These technologies enable digital transformation and automating error-prone manual tasks. With one in four Americans working remotely in 2021, according to Upwork’s Future Workforce Pulse Report, banks will also need to provide solutions that allow staff to be flexible in how they work, are easy to use, and reduce the training requirements so staff.

Though operational efficiency is inherently integral to any financial institutions’ well-being, many banks neglect the possibility of the gains.  Bank employees have a false fear of job loss, resulting in a missed strategic move to digital transformation and process automation for some institutions.

Existing workflow management and RPA technologies fall short of creating a seamless end-to-end digital experience. These technologies need to support work-from-home staff and bridge the gap created with systems that work in the cloud and on-premise. The result is the technology is harder to understand and takes longer to implement and adopt.

A new breed of digital transformation and process automation solutions offers an end-to-end digital transformation solution. Employees can digitally connect with customers and update manual back-office systems with simple, rule-based automations that significantly improve overall operational efficiency. FINBOA’s Process automation has shown a significant impact in minimizing errors, alleviating friction between systems, and improving business outcomes like time savings and compliance with regulations.

Save Employee Time

By eliminating tasks that once could dominate an employee’s entire workday, FINBOA’s process automation solutions free up employees to spend their time on revenue-generating tasks. For example, complying with Regulation E is a critical process for banks. Reg E is time-consuming and error-prone. Financial institutions often struggle to find knowledgeable staff to oversee complex regulatory workflows effectively. Banks routinely report that keeping up with Reg E requires additional FTEs to keep up with a growing number of claims. FINBOA’s Digital transformation and process automation empower existing staff to handle six times the volume. Automating processes like Reg E enable faster business growth and a focus on reducing losses.

Utilizing FINBOA’s process automation solution that automates Regulation E dispute tracking, Oconee State Bank reduced the amount of time it took to file consumer disputes by more than 80%, allowing for employees to spend more time on more strategic projects. Also, as the cloud-based process automation platform enabled customers to input data digitally, Oconee State Bank’s back-office eliminated time wasted on correcting inconsistent or incomplete information after the initial point of contact with a customer.

Reduce Simple Errors

Human error cannot be avoided with manual and disparate systems.

FINBOA’s process automation can help to remove those errors, also reducing compliance risks and findings. For example, process automation can strengthen the back office’s proficiency level by automatically generating deadline alerts and notifications and centralizing document management. This automation creates a consistent experience for bank customers and ensures employees do not create unnecessary risk for the bank, ultimately avoiding costly audits.

Alliance Bank of Wisconsin reported the time to prepare for audits dropped by 90%. The centralized document management reduced the time taken to search for missing documents. The consistent letters eliminated regulatory findings resulting from customized letters.

Remove Friction Between Systems

Banks have disparate systems that do not talk to each other. These systems, such as core, enterprise resource planning (ERP), online banking (OLB), and customer relationship management (CRM), are not integrated, making data transfer from one system to another costly to implement and maintain. FINBOA’s process automation can serve as the glue that moves data between these systems, maintaining consistent, up-to-date information without the need to re-key the data.

With FINBOA’s process automation platform, banks can stop wasting time spent on re-keying data. Centennial Bank automated file transfers one time during the onboarding process with FINBOA. The data transfers now happen automatically with no human intervention. Credit Union of Georgia automated the Online Banking experience making the customer experience more seamless.

The Key to Operational Excellence

FINBOA’s process automation solution helps bank employees’ productivity by automating manual steps, ensuring compliance, and digitally managing the entire process for quick and straightforward audits. FINBOA solutions drive operational excellence through a single platform that can automate functions from account opening to claim resolution.

The contents of this blog first appeared as an article by Raj Singal in Bank Business News on May 21, 2021.  To access the original article:  https://www.bankbusiness.us/why-digital-transformation-and-process-automation-is-the-missing-key-to-exceptional-operational-efficiency/