Financial institutions must implement intelligent automation (IA) to their current business processes. In the middle of such an economic downturn, you need to increase revenue and decrease costs. That means looking toward the future. Incorporating IA improves user experiences, increases efficiencies, and will help organizations remain in business as the finance sector moves into the digital space.

Gartner believes that intelligent automation can assist with all of these tasks. They predict that by 2025, 90 percent of firms will have automation architects to weld most if not all business processes with intelligent technology. Gartner also believes that workload automation, with “prebuilt integrations,” can reduce the need for custom scripting in development.

Whether your business is a bank, credit union, loan association or investment firm, using traditional methods will not suffice. Streamlining your processes with a synergistic amalgamation of digital process automation (DPA), robotic process management (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI) and integrations will prove beneficial both internally and externally.

Your managers don’t just want customers to convert and sign up for a bank account, while employees are saddled with outdated technology. They want to build relationships, in the fiscal sense, and to work with efficiency. Many businesses have redundant, inefficient processes that are hard to dismantle from the whole established system. This can lead to wasted time which can frustrate managers and increase costs.

Intelligent automation is the solution to help your employees with internal processes and their external ones. You want to acquire a customer for life if possible and nurture their value in the long-term. In addition, you want employees to work with efficiency and maximize the time they spend at work. That means using technology to assist with both and reduce the possibility of error. Workload automation is only one solution, and more are on the horizons.

Intelligent Automation in Financial Services

Many firms are already using intelligent automation to gain a competitive advantage. New technology can allow employees to work better during internal operations and reduce the time spent on redundant tasks. That way they can deliver personalized recommendations, develop customer profiles, and refine IT processes with ease. Institutions can also use them for risk management and fraud detection, to reduce the amount of potential lost revenue.

How Is IA Impacting Financial Institutions

Intelligent automation is rapidly becoming a necessity. Customer-centric policies mean that you have to serve your account owners or clients, with efficiency. When banks and firms have millions of customers, then they cannot have human managers addressing all of those needs, even with delegation. Productivity has greatly increased, as a result, as has customer satisfaction with these developments.

Increases Customer Engagement

IA can help with customer relationship management. They can also incentivize the customer to act in your favor. In the case of financial services, managers want to build a relationship with every customer. Intelligent automation can do so by controlling every step of the process and reducing the time invested.

Such a relationship has high value for both parties. As an institution receives fees, interest or revenue for their time, the customer can state their demands and requirements. Each party ideally will receive these dues fairly.

Increased customer engagement increases the share of wallet that the institution receives, as well as productivity in real-time. Thus, give your users an incentive to participate. Intelligent automation does that by increasing convenience.

Improves Customer Experience (Internal and External)

In this case, the customer would be your financial institution employees in addition to bank account holders, investors, stakeholders, client organizations, or stockholders. Bank managers and IT specialists, unfortunately, run the risk of working with outdated, older technology. This can cause delays and frustrations when they attempt to provide customer service, and can annoy the customer as well.

Outdated technology wastes company time and money, and specialists would have to implement more training to adopt new technologies. Banks do not suffer this problem alone; brokers also need updated technology to handle stocks, while lending institutions.

We believe that intelligent automation needs to reduce the time that would be spent on repetitive, tedious tasks. The automation should also have a low-learning curve for specialists and managers, ideally with no coding required. When it is easy to master software, the time invested in learning the material is minimal.

The technology should also pave the way towards the real-time analysis of data collected. This analysis can provide managers a means of strategizing solutions to existing problems, without spending excessive hours on receiving and curating the information in the first place.

Consider incident management as one example. “Incidents” are when bank account holders file complaints with the company, and employees have to record them. Managers can find a direct relationship between the number of incidents and customers who switch, so it’s in their best interest to reduce these, for the sake of maintaining revenue and customers.

The drawback is that these incidents can run from severe account issues to minor annoyances for the bank customer. If employees manually collected and organized all these incidents, then they would spend days on the task. Intelligent automation can do the collection and organization, providing tangible results to the managers. Then they can focus on reducing the complaints, which helps everyone in the office with their productivity.

Manage Customer Transaction Lifecycle

The customer transaction lifecycle has many steps that automation can streamline, and stages including acquisition and loyalty. In this case, automation can help encourage a customer to make a transaction. They can open an account, apply for a loan, or start working with an investment firm. The first step is to deliver services to them rapidly and at the utmost convenience.

Relationship managers, if a part of your business ecosystem, should have access to a user-friendly dashboard. Ideally, such a dashboard overlooks the process with ease so that they can identify necessary factors and variables. If they can see the whole, then they can make changes accordingly when a machine organizes the data.

Automation saves them time on collecting and organizing the information and simplifying the process. They also will factor in real-time changes which are important for stocks and investments.

The trick is to simplify all of your customer interactions so that both parties end up satisfied. If you answer all of your customer concerns, address complaints and handle transactions with care, then you have loyalty in the bag.

Gain Deeper Insights

Intelligent automation also allows you to collect data on customer behavior and how to adjust your policies on managing them. Access to this data can make all the difference in helping you survive.

Machine learning is a means by which software and computers can learn how to predict customer behavior and adapt accordingly. This can refine customer acquisition strategies in the future.

Consider Virtus Flow’s Process Automation Software

Virtus Flow wants all of our financial customers to have access to the highest-quality automation. We also streamline processes to save time for you and your workers.

Reach out to us today to learn more about our Intelligent Workflows and other services. Gain a competitive advantage over other institutions in your field. You’ll be ready to acquire more customers and automate your processes within a matter of minutes.