Process Automation and Financial Services

What your Firm Can Learn from Finance Service Companies & Operational Excellence

With companies facing increased pressure to demonstrate measurable compliance, performance and customer service improvements, operational excellence has moved up the value chain. The results of a recent survey of financial services firms worldwide provides more evidence that the winners in today’s market are organizations who leverage the knowledge and skills or their operations teams and deploy new and emerging technologies to become more agile and allow their staff to contribute greater value by automating routine, non-value-added tasks.

According to the 2017 Operational Excellence in Financial Services Benchmark Report from the Process Excellence Network (PEX), over half of companies surveyed were focused on process automation (57%) or process redesign work (51%).

Process Automation Seen as Key to Operational Excellence

One survey participant Huw Patterson, Business Solutions and Automation Leader at ANZ, described why process automation is such a high priority. “The advantage of leveraging process automation is that you can retain your SMEs and have them working in tandem with your process automations,” Patterson said. “Send the simple stuff to the robots, and any complex cases or exceptions to your experienced operators. You have a wider impact there with more efficient processes, better customer experiences, and subject matter experts retained.”

While costs savings from automating operations are usually enough to support the business case, more survey participants cited customer satisfaction (31%) as the primary measure of success for their process improvement initiatives than cost savings (26%).

Cloud Computing and BPM Lead the Way

Not surprisingly, Cloud Computing (75%) topped the list of new technologies adopted by firms seeking to achieve operational excellence, followed by data management (53%), business process management (50%) and robotic process automation (42%).

Patterson sees the spotlight on BPM as encouraging and exciting for firms seeking to achieve greater customer satisfaction and build value.

“[BPM Suites] they are a force multiplier with automation. You can zero-in on the real pain-points in your business and informed ROI decisions based on real data.”

Robotic Process Automation + Intelligent Capture

PEX’s survey’s results speaks to the value that organizations worldwide, in a wide range of industries, are deriving from automating routine processes to gain more immediate access to data and business knowledge while streamlining processes, cutting costs and improving customer service.

Automating some of the most fundamental steps common to most business processes is critical to the success of any project that leverages cloud computing, BPM or RPA to achieve operational excellence. Common routine tasks like document handling/processing, data entry, routing and approval can be automated easily and cost-effectively using Smart Process Platforms to intelligently classify documents, extract and validate relevant data, enter that data into business systems like ERP or BPM platforms and execute workflows for the data and documents based on business rules.

To learn more about achieving operational excellence through business process automation, contact your Artsyl Technologies account executive.

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