Michael Porter’s value chain has been one of the top seminal business management ideas that saw business operations with through a new lens. Just like the value chain resulted in concepts like value creation and value pricing leading to phenomenal growth in global business scale and operations in the last 50 years, we are now seeing a similar scenario in the financial services industry with intelligent automation.
At the turn of the century, we saw a new concept emerge that resulted in changing the business dynamics in the Y2K. This new business concept came to be known as value network, a series of interactions between individuals, entities, organizations, departments, and systems that collectively work towards benefitting the entire group or ecosystem. This new concept had an astounding impact on how businesses and markets operated and paved the course of today’s business ecosystem. For instance, the rise of Apple and its ecosystem can be attributed to this shift.
A similar shift is also taking place in the financial services industry, where the digitization, embedment, and now decentralization of the payments ecosystem with the commercialization of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, procure to pay (P2P) lending are being touted as the next big thing.
Given the pervasive technical and innovative initiatives that are emerging at breakneck speed, it is a necessity necessary to keep transforming and innovating. This is especially relevant for the financial services industry which have millennials as customers and will soon begin catering to GenZ.
To digitally transform a bank’s value network let’s start by stating the three core areas of a bank’s value network namely, network promotion & contract management, service provisioning & billing, and platform operations.
With a two-sided value network, the bank fundamentally connects a borrower with a depositor and thus, becomes the enabler of value creation for such a network. In doing so, a bank delivers core banking and back-office operations, payments and lending functions, and risk and treasury management activities.
For each of these areas, hundreds of functions and duties must be seamlessly executed with precision. Today, the increase in business volumes and scale of operations has led to bankers asking, “What if these complex and time-consuming operations can be boosted with robots (bots) assisting humans to accelerate speed, increase productivity, and assure the precision of key banking functions?”
Some of the key operational areas where bots can and, in many cases, are assisting humans to realize the true potential of an enterprise are customer service, compliance accounts payable, credit card processing, mortgage processing, fraud detection, know your customer (KYC) process, general ledger, report automation and account closure process.
By embracing bots, banks can improve the customer experience while reducing costs and improving efficiency. Increased automation combined with more efficient processes makes the day-to-day easier for teams and individual contributors as they will spend less time on tedious manual work, and more time on profitable projects. Let humans contribute to high-value innovation, and robots help in maintaining and running operations to ensure an efficient and effective enterprise. To realize the true value of bots, and for a bank to embark on its digital transformation journey, the right approach, executive sponsor, business alignment, process discovery & design, pilot, roadmap, and a center of excellence (CoE) is essential to succeed. By using tactics such as data alignment, problem framing, road mapping, and piloting new robots, a bank will be well poised to reach its automation goals.
Blanc Labs has deep industry knowledge and proven experience working with leading banks to gain efficiencies through intelligent automation solutions. We take a holistic approach, helping financial services companies build the necessary foundation and setting them up for long-term success.
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