Robotic Process Automation (RPA) delivers saving through efficiency, but another layer of cost-saving often goes unconsidered.
RPA brings additional value through ensuring compliance. RPA is a rules-driven solution which makes it ideal for operating within regulations. Therefore, it is not at risk of making errors that end up costing organizations big in penalties. We’ve chosen to focus on one industry with compliance pressures and strong RPA adoption as our example.
Banking
The 2008 crash led to the imposition of a much higher level of banking regulation. As a result, banks now invest a much higher level of their resources into ensuring their compliance. Forbes wrote an article in 2018, which gave an insight into the problem.
“It took 30,000+ pages and 1.7 million paragraphs to describe the rules in MiFID II and has cost the industry over €2.5 billion to date to implement. Much of this cost has been spent interpreting and re-writing the rules into business texts and computer code. And the problem is only going to get more complicated. Over 50,000 regulations were published across the G20 between 2009 and 2012. This rose to over 50,000 regulatory updates in 2015, almost double that of 2012.”
So how does banking usually keep all of these regulations in line? Well, a portion of the whole effort involves processing large amounts of data into reports manually. Analysts would scan through internal and external systems for hours. As mentioned in the Forbes article above, the problem is regulations are only becoming more complex and numerous. So now, many financial institutions are turning to RPA as a solution.
RPA bots are experts at automating a rules-based, repetitive task, which has made it ideal for banking compliance management uses. For instance, in the areas of monitoring and testing, there are substantial opportunities for automation. Sometimes thousands of tests are required for large organizations.
Here’s a use case from UiPath’s blog on the topic
UiPath has gathered good use cases they’ve encountered in the blog above, but we’re going to draw from the first one.
Like we mentioned previously after the 2008 Financial crisis regulations started rising more rapidly. One area focused on was mortgage lending. “In most cases, remediations are manually managed or done as a result of customer complaints, audit findings, or due to a regulatory push. Due to large volumes, completing all the remediation steps starting with scoping a customer refund or adjustment can take months before the error can be resolved.”
What does UiPath do to bring RPA cost savings?
First, the bots can extract all of the data necessary and then verify there are no errors. Following that, “UiPath robots can complete the remediation of an account by completing the general ledger (GL) entries for respective customers where discrepancies are identified. Also, in cases where information is required from customers, emails or notifications are sent.” Finally, the bots can generate a report on the automation process for review.
This whole process, which previously would only be triggered by outside sources, can be automated and made continuous. Before, a team of employees would spend hours on this task, but now it takes seconds. Those employees can now work on more high-value processes, and the organization can focus their resources away from ensuring compliance.
RPA lowers risk and makes compliance more efficient
As we’ve said before, RPA thrives in a rules-based environment making it ideal for compliance management. One of the significant advantages of RPA is it will run with complete accuracy. Copy-paste errors can sometimes cost big, and there are whole departments dedicated to the risk they might.
Consider where your organization could make use of an RPA bot to automate compliance. Opportunities for automation can take the form of small portions of a process or a whole end-to-end solution.
If you’re interested in learning more about our RPA capabilities, follow the link below.