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Using RPA in Banking

All banking or financial institutions can relate to the struggle of managing piles of structured and unstructured data daily. This task requires repetitive and manual effort from your employees that they could otherwise dedicate to high-value work. It can also be time-consuming and prone to errors, ultimately hampering your bank’s customer experience. Fortunately, automation technologies are proving to be a boon for the finance sector.

The finance domain is experiencing a major transformation, with banking automation and digitization at the forefront. According to a study by McKinsey, machines will handle between 10% to 25% of banking functions in the next few years, which can free up valuable time and resources for employees to focus on more strategic initiatives.

What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

RPA is an automation technology governed by structured inputs and business logic. RPA in banking is a powerful tool that can automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks. It allows banks and financial institutions to gain a competitive advantage by automating routine tasks cost-effectively, fast, and without errors.

Banks, credit unions, or other financial institutions can set up robotic applications to handle tasks like capturing and analyzing information from documents, performing transactions, triggering responses, managing data, and coordinating with other digital systems. The possibilities for using RPA in finance are innumerable and can include a range of functionalities such as generating reports, sending auto emails, and even auto-decisioning.

How RPA works

Robotic Process Automation works by automating repetitive and routine tasks that are currently performed manually. Software robots, also known as ‘bots,’ are designed to mimic human actions and interactions with digital systems. These rule-based bots can be configured to perform specific tasks, such as document processing, data entry, transaction execution, complete keystrokes, and more.

Once a bot is configured, it can be triggered to run automatically or on a schedule, freeing up human resources to focus on customer service or other higher-value or strategic activities. The bot interacts with the relevant systems and applications, capturing and analyzing data, navigating systems, and automating workflows as needed.

One of the key advantages of RPA in finance is that it is non-intrusive, meaning that it operates within existing systems and processes, without requiring any changes to the underlying infrastructure. This means that no changes are made to the underlying applications. RPA bots perform tasks in a similar manner to employees- by signing into applications, entering data, conducting calculations, and logging out. They do this at the user interface or application surface layer by imitating mouse movements and the keystrokes made by employees.

This makes it easier to implement and reduces the risk of disruption to existing operations. As per Forbes, RPA usage has seen a rise in popularity in the last few years and will continue to see double-digit growth in 2023.Many people use the terms ‘RPA’ and ‘Intelligent Automation’ (IA) interchangeably. Both are banking automation technologies that improve efficiency, but are they the same?

Are RPA and Intelligent Automation the same?

No, RPA is not IA and IA is not RPA. While RPA is a rule-based approach for everyday tasks, intelligent automation uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies to automate more complex and strategic processes. IA encompasses a wide range of technologies which includes RPA. IA enables organizations to automate not just manual tasks but also decision-making processes and allows for continuous improvement through self-learning.

A combination of IA and RPA can unlock the true potential of banking automation. When RPA is combined with the powers of AI, ML, and natural language processing, it dramatically increases the software’s skills to execute advanced cognitive processes like understanding speech, carrying out conversations, comprehending semi-structured tasks such as purchase orders, invoices and unstructured documents like emails, text files and images.

Thus, RPA and its combination technologies are fully capable of taking your banking and financial business to new heights.

What are the benefits of RPA in Banking?

The global RPA market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 23.4%, from $10.01 Billion in 2022 to $43.2 Billion in 2029. Evidently, more industries worldwide are realizing the importance of RPA. Here are some benefits of using RPA in banking and financial institutions.

Improved Scalability

Robots can work faster and longer than humans without taking breaks. RPA can also be scaled to meet changing business needs, making it an ideal solution for organizations that are looking to grow and expand their operations and provide additional services.

Enhanced Compliance and Risk Management

RPA can help banks and financial institutions improve their compliance and risk management processes. For example, the software can be configured to monitor transactions for potential fraud and to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. It can also inform the bank authorities in case any anomaly is found.

Improved Customer Service

RPA can enable faster and more personalized service to customers. For example, the software can be configured to handle routine customer inquiries and transactions, reduce wait times and improving the overall customer experience.

Increased Efficiency

RPA can automate repetitive and manual tasks, redirecting human resources to other higher-value and strategic activities. This can result in faster processing times, improved accuracy, and reduced costs. According to a study by Deloitte, banking institutions could save about $40 million over the first 3 years of using RPA in banking.

Better Data Management

RPA can automate the collection, analysis, and management of data, making it easier for banks and financial institutions to gain insights and make informed decisions. This means faster account opening or closing, loan and document processing, data entry, and retrieval.

Top Use Cases of RPA in Banking

RPA can be applied in several ways in the banking and finance industry. Here are some examples of RPA use cases in banking and finance:

Accounts Payable

RPA can automate the manual, repetitive tasks involved in the accounts payable process, such as vendor invoice processing, field validation, and payment authorization. RPA software in combination with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can be configured to extract data from invoices, perform data validation, and generate payment requests, reducing the risk of errors and freeing up human resources. This system can also notify the bank in case of any errors.

Mortgage Processing

Mortgage processing involves hundreds of documents that need to be gathered and assessed. RPA can streamline the mortgage application process by automating tasks such as document verification, credit checks, and loan underwriting. By using RPA to handle routine tasks, banks, and financial institutions can improve processing time, reduce the risk of errors, and enhance the overall customer experience.

Fraud Detection

According to the Federal Trade Comission (FTC), banks face the ultimate risk of forgoing money to fraud, which costs them almost $8.8 billion in revenue in 2022. This figure was 30% more than than what was lost to bank fraud in 2021 . RPA can assist in detecting potential fraud by automating the monitoring of transactions for unusual patterns and anomalies. Bots can be configured to perform real-time ‘if-then’ analysis of transaction data, flagging potential fraud cases as defined for further investigation by human analysts.

KYC (Know Your Customer)

RPA can automate the KYC onboarding process, including the collection, verification, and analysis of customer data. RPA software can be configured to handle routine tasks such as data entry, document verification, and background checks, reducing the risk of errors and faster account opening, thus resulting in enhanced customer satisfaction.

Thus, using RPA in your bank and financial institution can not only save time and money but also boost productivity. Banking automation gives you a chance to gain a competitive edge by leveraging technology and becoming more efficient.

Blanc Labs Automation Solution for Banks

Blanc Labs helps banks, credit unions, and financial institutions with their digital transformation journey by providing solutions that are RPA-based. Our services include integrating advanced automation technologies into your processes to boost efficiency and reduce the potential for errors caused by manual effort.

We offer a tailored approach that combines RPA, ML, and AI to automate complex tasks, such as mortgage processing and document processing, allowing you to conserve resources, speed up decision-making and provide quicker and improved financial services to your customers.

If your bank processes a huge amount of data everyday, we can help you. Book a discovery call with us and let us explain how we can increase the efficiency of your bank’s core functions. Our team will analyze your current processes and propose a tailor-made automation solution that can operate seamlessly and in conjunction with your existing systems.

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How to Automate Loan Origination Systems

Loan origination automation is critical because the loan origination process is labor-intensive and prone to human error.

Translation?

The process takes expensive human capital that you can dedicate to other, more strategic tasks. It’s also prone to human error, which increases your costs and puts your reputation at risk.

Automating the process takes humans out of the equation, minimizing the cost of human capital and the risk of human error.

In this article, we explain how to automate the process using an automated loan origination system.

What is the Loan Origination Process?

Loan origination is the process of receiving a mortgage application from a borrower, underwriting the application, and releasing the funds to the borrower or rejecting the application.

When a customer applies for a mortgage, the lender initiates (or originates) the process necessary to determine if a borrower should be lent funds according to the institution’s policies.

The process is extensive and takes an average of 35 to 40 days. The origination process involves five steps, as explained below.

Prequalification

Prequalification is a screening stage. This is where lenders look for potential reasons that can adversely impact a borrower’s capability to repay the loan.

Typically, lenders look for things like:

Income: Does the borrower make enough money to be able to service the loan payments, and is that income consistent?
Assets: Should the borrower’s income stop for some reason; do they have enough assets to remain solvent given their existing liabilities?
Debt: Is the borrower overleveraged? Are the debts secured or unsecured?
Credit record: Has the buyer made loan payments on time in the past?

These factors help the lender determine if they should spend time processing the application further.

Preparing a Loan Packet

Lenders create a packet (essentially a file of documents) for prequalified borrowers.

The packet includes the borrower’s documents, including KYC, financial statements, and other relevant documents that provide an overview of the borrower’s debt servicing capability.

Lenders also include documents that highlight the reasons that make an applicant eligible or ineligible to be considered for the loan.

For example, the lender may include the borrower’s debt-to-income ratio, properties and assets at market value, and income streams to provide an overview of whether the borrower is a good candidate for the loan.

Some lenders take extra steps to double-check the applicant’s claims.

For example, lenders might hire a valuer or research property rates to verify your real estate investment’s current market value. The valuer’s report is added to the packet for the underwriter’s reference.

Negotiation

Many borrowers, especially those with an excellent credit record, browse their options before accepting a lender’s offer.

The borrower might want to negotiate a lower rate or ask for a fixed rate instead of a floating rate.

Term Sheet Disclosure

A term sheet is a summary of the loan. It’s a non-binding document that contains the terms and conditions of the mortgage deal.

The term sheet includes the tenure, interest rate, principal amount, foreclosure charges, processing fees, and other relevant details.

Loan Closing

If the negotiations go well and the borrower accepts the offer, the lender closes the loan.

The lender creates various closing documents, including final closing disclosure, titling documents, and a promissory note.

The borrower and lender sign the documents, and the lender disburses the funds as agreed.

3 Ways to Automate Loan Origination

Now that you know the loan origination process, let’s talk about automating parts of this process to make it more efficient.

Digitizing Loan Applications

You can create an online portal where applicants can initiate a loan application and upload their KYC and other documents.

The documents are automatically transferred to your internal systems for prequalifying the applicant.

IDP extracts and relays the applicant’s data from the documents to your system.

Once the data is in the system, robotic process automation (RPA) can be used to determine if an applicant should be prequalified.

You can use a machine learning (ML) algorithm for deeper insights.

ML can help identify characteristics that make a person more or less likely to service the loan until the end of the term, allowing you to make smarter decisions.

Assembling Loan Documentation

Cloud-based RPA can collect documents from the online portal and organize them in one location. Not only are digital copies faster to collect, but they’re easy to store and search.

Think about it. You’ve received an application, but it’s missing the cash flow statement for last year. You’ll need to email or call the applicant to upload the documents, wasting your and the applicant’s time.

Lenders typically have a document checklist. Automating checklists is easy with RPA — when the applicant forgets to upload a document, the RPA can trigger notifications to the applicant.

The system can also notify the loan officer if the applicant becomes non-responsive.

Speeding Up Underwriting

Borrowers want faster access to funds, but lenders must complete their due diligence.

Lending automation can help reduce the time between application and approval.

With technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), ML, and RPA, automation systems can assess an applicant’s creditworthiness within seconds.

RPA can help with basics like checking the minimum credit score and income levels. RPA can also flag any areas that indicate greater risk, such as excessive variability in the applicant’s cash flows.

Moreover, loan origination is a compliance-heavy process. It’s easy to forget a small step when you’re overwhelmed with loan applications.

RPA ensures all compliance steps are taken care of. If they’re not, the system can trigger alerts for the underwriter as well as the superiors.

AI and ML can provide deeper insights. These technologies can use big data to identify patterns that make a borrower more likely to default, allowing you to make smarter decisions fast.

Moreover, AI and ML can help you look beyond credit scores and find people that are more creditworthy than their credit scores suggest.

As Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara, assistant professor of finance at Louisiana State University, explains:

“Traditional models tend to lock anyone with a low credit score—including many young people, college-educated people, low-income people, Black and Hispanic people and anyone who lives in an area where there are more minorities, renters and foreign-born—out of the credit market.”

How Shortening Loan Origination With Automation Helps

Shortening the loan origination process benefits you in multiple ways:

Match customer expectations: You’ll deliver on the customers’ expectations by offering faster loan processing. 40% of mortgage customers are willing to complete the entire process using self-serve digital tools, but 67% still interact with a human representative via phone.
Deliver better experiences: Automation offers various opportunities to improve customer experience. For example, you can set up an AI chatbot that responds to customers’ questions in real time.
Increase efficiency: You can process more applications per month by automating loan origination.
Better use of your staff’s time: Automated workflows allow credit officers to focus on parts of the business that require a human touch, such as building stronger relationships with clients, than on repetitive tasks that automation can perform more accurately.

Loan Origination Automation with Blanc Labs

Selecting the right partner to set up loan origination automation is critical. Partnering with Blanc Labs ensures frictionless implementation of a personalized loan origination system.

Blanc Labs tailor-makes solutions best suited for your needs and workflow. Blanc Labs starts by assessing your needs and creating a strategy to streamline your loan origination processes. Then, Blanc Labs creates an automation system using technologies like RPA, AI, and ML.

Book a demo to learn how Blanc Labs can help you automate your loan origination workflow.

Articles

Banking Automation: The Complete Guide

Banks are process-driven organizations. Processes ensure accuracy and consistency across the organization. They are also repetitive. Over the past decade, the transition to digital systems has helped speed up and minimize repetitive tasks. But to prepare yourself for your customers’ growing expectations, increase scalability, and stay competitive, you need a complete banking automation solution.

Systems powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) can help automate repetitive tasks, minimize human error, detect fraud, and more, at scale. You can deploy these technologies across various functions, from customer service to marketing.

Many, if not all banks and credit unions, have introduced some form of automation into their operations. According to McKinsey, the potential value of AI and analytics for global banking could reach as high as $1 trillion.

If you are curious about how you can become an AI-first bank, this guide explains how you can use banking automation to transform and prepare your processes for the future.

What is Banking Automation?

Banking automation involves automating tasks that previously required manual effort.

For example, banks have conventionally required staff to check KYC documents manually. However, banking automation helps automatically scan and store KYC documents without manual intervention.

Cost saving is generally one of RPA’s biggest advantages.

According to a Gartner report, 80% of finance leaders have implemented or plan to implement RPA initiatives.

The report highlights how RPA can lower your costs considerably in various ways. For example, RPA costs roughly a third of an offshore employee and a fifth of an onshore employee.

You can make automation solutions even more intelligent by using RPA capabilities with technologies like AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP). According to a McKinsey study, AI offers 50% incremental value over other analytics techniques for the banking industry.

With that in mind, let’s look closely at RPA and how it works.

Generative AI and Banking Automation

The latest trend in banking automation is the use of Generative AI.

According to Insider Intelligence’s ChatGPT and Generative AI in Banking report, generative AI will have the greatest impact on data-rich sectors such as:

Retail banking and wealth: Generative AI can create more accurate NLP models and help automated systems process KYC documents and open accounts faster.
SMB banking: Generative AI can help interpret non-numeric data, like business plans, more effectively.
Commercial banking: Generative AI will enable customers to get answers about financial performance in complex scenarios.
Investing banking and capital markets: Banks could use generative AI to stress test balance sheets with complex and illiquid assets.

Banks are already using generative AI for financial reporting analysis & insight generation. According to Deloitte, some emerging banking areas where generative AI will play a key role include fraud simulation & detection and tax and compliance audit & scenario testing.

What is RPA?

Robotic process automation, or RPA, is a technology that performs actions generally performed by humans manually or with digital tools.

Say you have a customer onboarding form in your banking software. You must fill it out each time a customer opens an account. You’re manually performing a task using a digital tool.

RPA can perform this task without human effort. The difference? RPA does it more accurately and tirelessly—software robots don’t need eight hours of sleep or coffee breaks.

You can implement RPA quickly, even on legacy systems that lack APIs or virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs).

Implementing RPA can help improve employee satisfaction and productivity by eliminating the need to work on repetitive tasks.

You can use RPA in banking operations for various purposes.

For example, Credigy, a multinational financial organization, has an extensive due diligence process for consumer loans.

The process was prone to errors and time-consuming. The company decided to implement RPA and automate the entire process, saving their staff and business partners plenty of time to focus on other, more valuable opportunities.

The Need for Automation in Banking Operations

Banks need automation to:

Deliver better customer experiences
Increase online security

Improve decision making
Empowering employees

Below, are more reasons for your bank to automate operations.

To Deliver Faster, Personalized Customer Experiences

New-gen customers want banks that can provide fast financial services online.

The 2021 Digital Banking Consumer Survey from PwC found that 20%-25% of consumers prefer to open a new account digitally but can’t.

Thanks to the pandemic, the shift to digital has picked up pace. A digital portal for banking is almost a non-negotiable requirement for most bank customers.

In fact, 70% of Bank of America clients engage with the bank digitally. The bank’s newsroom reported that a whopping 7 million Bank of America customers used Erica, its chatbot, for the first time during the pandemic.

A chatbot can provide personalized support to your customers. A level 3 AI chatbot can collect the required information from prospects that inquire about your bank’s services and offer personalized solutions.

A chatbot is a great way for customers to get answers, but it’s also an excellent way to minimize traffic for your support desk.

To Improve Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is expensive but is also the #1 risk for global banks according to EY. The survey found that cyber controls are the top priority for boosting operation resilience according to 65% of Chief Risk Officers (CROs) who responded to the survey.

Using automation to create a cybersecurity framework and identity protection protocols can help differentiate your bank and potentially increase revenue. You can get more business from high-value individual accounts and accounts of large companies that expect banks to have a top-notch security framework.

Automating cybersecurity helps take remedial actions faster. For example, the automated system can freeze compromised accounts in seconds and help fast-track fraud investigations.

Of course, you don’t need to implement that automation system overnight. With cloud computing, you can start cybersecurity automation with a few priority accounts and scale over time.

For Better Decision Making

AI and ML algorithms can use data to provide deep insights into your client’s preferences, needs, and behavior patterns.

These insights can improve decision-making across the board. For example, using these insights in your marketing strategy can help hyper-target marketing campaigns and improve returns.

Moreover, these insights help deliver greater value to customers. By making faster and smarter decisions, you’ll be able to respond to customers’ fast-evolving needs with speed and precision.

As a McKinsey article explains, banks that use ML to decide in real-time the best way to engage with customers can increase value in the following ways:

Stronger customer acquisition: Automation and advanced analytics help improve customer experience. They help personalize marketing across the customer acquisition journey, which can improve conversions.
Higher customer lifetime value: You can increase lifetime value by consistently engaging with customers to strengthen relationships across products and services.
Lower operating costs: Banks can reduce costs by fully automating document processing, review, and decision-making.
Lower credit risk: Banks can screen customers by analyzing behavior patterns that signal higher default or fraud risk.

To Empower Employees

As you digitize banking processes, you’ll need to train employees. Reskilling employees allows them to use automation technologies effectively, making their job easier.

Your employees will have more time to focus on more strategic tasks by automating the mundane ones. This results in increased employee satisfaction and retention and allows them to focus on things that contribute to your topline — such as building customer relationships, innovating processes, and brainstorming ways to address customers’ most pressing issues.

Challenges Faced by Banks Today

Here are some key challenges that banks face today and how automation can help address them:

Inefficient Manual Processes

Manual processes are time and resource-intensive.

According to the 2021 AML Banking Survey, relying on manual processes hampers a financial organization’s revenue-generating ability and exposes them to unnecessary risk.

The simplest banking processes (like opening a new account) require multiple staff members to invest time. Moreover, the process generates paperwork you’ll need to store for compliance.

While you complete the account opening process, the customer is on standby, waiting to start using their account.

The slow service doesn’t exactly make a great impression. Customers want to be able to start using their accounts faster. If you’re too slow, they’ll find a bank that offers faster service.

Automation helps shorten the time between account application and access. But that’s just one of the processes that automation can speed up.

Technologies like RPA and AI can help fast-track processes across departments, including accounting, customer support, and marketing.

Automation Without Integration

Banks often implement multiple solutions to automate processes. However, often, these systems don’t integrate with other systems.

For end-to-end automation, each process must relay the output to another system so the following process can use it as input.

For example, you can automate KYC verification. But after verification, you also need to store these records in a database and link them with a new customer account. For this, your internal systems need to be integrated.

Connecting banking systems requires APIs. Think of APIs as translators. They help two software solutions communicate with each other. A system can relay output to another system through an API, enabling end-to-end process automation.

Increase in Competition

Canadians want more competition in banking. The competition in banking will become fiercer over the next few years as the regulations become more accommodating of innovative fintech firms and open banking is introduced.

An increase in competition will give customers more power. They’ll demand better service, 24×7 availability, and faster response times.

You’ll need automation to achieve these objectives and make yourself stand out in the crowd.

Benefits of Automation in Banking

Once you invest in automation, you can expect to derive the following benefits:

Improves Operational Efficiency

An error-free automation system can supercharge operational efficiency.

You’ll have to spend little to no time performing or monitoring the process. Moreover, you’ll notice fewer errors since the risk of human error is minimal when you’re using an automated system.

Implementing automation allows you to operate legacy and new systems more resiliently by automating across your system infrastructure. This increases efficiency, consistency, and speed.

Makes Processes Scalable

Banks noticed how automation could be an excellent investment during the pandemic. As explained in a World Economic Forum (WEF) article:

“Through the combination of a distinct data element with robotics process automation, it is possible to generate client documentation from management tools and archives at a high frequency. Due to its scalability, high volumes can be managed more efficiently.”

The article provides the example of Swiss banks. During the pandemic, Swiss banks like UBS used credit robots to support the credit processing staff in approving requests. The support from robots helped UBS process over 24,000 applications in 24-hour operating mode.

In addition to RPA, banks can also use technologies like optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent document processing (IDP) to digitize physical mail and distribute it to remote teams.

Cost Reduction

Automation helps reduce costs on multiple fronts:

a. Stationery

80% of banks still favor some form of print statements. The cost of paper used for these statements can translate to a significant amount. Automation and digitization can eliminate the need to spend paper and store physical documents.

b. Human error

Human error can require reworks and cause delays in processing customer requests. Errors can result in direct losses (like a lost sale) and indirect losses (like a lost reputation). Minimizing errors can help reduce the cost associated with human error.

c. Increased employee satisfaction

You’ll spend less per unit with more productive employees. Automation can help improve employee satisfaction levels by allowing them to focus on their core duties.

For example, a sales rep might want to grow by exploring new sales techniques and planning campaigns. They can focus on these tasks once you automate processes like preparing quotes and sales reports.

Working on non-value-adding tasks like preparing a quote can make employees feel disengaged. When you automate these tasks, employees find work more fulfilling and are generally happier since they can focus on what they do best.

Happiness makes people around 12% more productive, according to a recent study by the University of Warwick.

As Professor Sgroi explains, “The driving force seems to be that happier workers use the time they have more effectively, increasing the pace at which they can work without sacrificing quality.”

Customer Satisfaction

Automation can help meet customer expectations in various ways.

Speed is one of the most difficult expectations to meet for banks. You want to offer faster service but must also complete due diligence processes to stay compliant. That’s where automation helps.

61% of customers feel a quick resolution is vital to customer service. As a bank, you need to be able to answer your customers’ questions fast.

How fast? Ideally, in real-time.

A level 3 AI chatbot can help provide real-time, personalized responses to your customers’ questions.

In addition to real-time support, modern customers also demand fast service. For example, customers should be able to open a bank account fast once they submit the documents. You can achieve this by automating document processing and KYC verification.

Better Risk Management

Automation can help minimize operational, compliance, and fraud risk.

Since little to no manual effort is involved in an automated system, your operations will almost always run error-free.

You can also automate compliance processes. For example, you can add validation checkpoints to ensure the system catches any data irregularities before you submit the data to a regulatory authority.

Automation can help minimize fraud risk too. Using AI and ML can help flag suspicious activities and trigger alerts. As this study by Deloitte explains:

“Machine learning can also analyze big data more efficiently, build statistical models quickly, and react to new suspicious behaviors faster.”

Using traditional methods (like RPA) for fraud detection requires creating manual rules. RPA works well in a structured data environment. But given the high volume of complex data in banking, you’ll need ML systems for fraud detection.

Blanc Labs’ Banking Automation Solutions

Blanc Labs helps banks, credit unions, and Fintechs automate their processes. We tailor-make automation tools and systems based on your needs. Our systems take work off your plate and supercharge process efficiency.

Our team deploys technologies like RPA, AI, and ML to automate your processes. We integrate these systems (and your existing systems) to allow frictionless data exchange.

Book a discovery call to learn more about how automation can drive efficiency and gains at your bank.

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IDP vs. RPA vs. OCR

Financial institutions deal with a lot of data from various sources like forms, emails, invoices, PDFs, etc. daily. Processing this unstructured data manually is time-consuming and requires a lot of effort. It can also be prone to errors, which can have costly consequences. This can take away from the time and energy that employees could be spending on more strategic tasks.

Automation technologies like IDP (Intelligent Document Processing), RPA (Robotic Process Automation), and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) can take manual document processing off your hands.

If you are wondering which one you should choose among IDP vs. RPA vs. OCR for the digital transformation of your financial institution, you are in the right place. Here we break down each banking automation technology to help you choose the best one.

What is RPA?

RPA is a technology that allows organizations to automate repetitive, routine tasks typically performed by humans. These tasks include data entry, document processing, customer service interactions, and back-office functions such as compliance, risk management, and accounting.

What is possible with RPA, and where does it fall short?

Banks are known to be heavily regulated, and compliance is a critical part of banking operations. This is where RPA can play a significant role by automating compliance-related tasks, such as KYC (Know Your Customer), AML (Anti Money Laundering), and other regulatory data management. It can also automate data migration, trade execution, data validation, data updates, and perform simple copy/paste functions.

However, RPA in banking automation also has some limitations. RPA requires a developer or GUI window to operate. Thus, RPA can only be used to automate simple screen-related tasks. It is limited to automating tasks that are highly structured and rule-based and is not suitable for tasks that require human judgment or decision-making.

Also, the entire automation process can break if there is an update in the user interface of a linked software. It is an outdated technology that relies on OCR and is not built for modern end-to-end integration.

What is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)?

IDP is a next-generation technology designed to tackle the limitations of RPA. It is a system created to process documents just like humans. If you compare IDP with RPA for banking automation, you will find that IDP is the ideal combination of OCR, Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and natural language processing.

IDP is independent of strict rule-based approaches. Due to its flexibility, it can reach and process unstructured data not reachable via RPA. IDP tools also reduce the margin for errors by validating the data and informing the team in cases that need human intervention.

Here are some reasons why banks need Intelligent Document Processing.

How can IDP help in banking automation?

IDP can be a valuable tool in banking automation in several ways:

Account Opening

You can use IDP to automate extracting information from account opening forms and other related documents. It can reduce the effort and time required for manual data entry and improve the accuracy of the data.

Document Management

IDP can index, classify and route documents to the appropriate systems or individuals. Thanks to intelligent document processing, financial institutions can manage documents effectively and quickly retrieve the necessary information.

Compliance

IDP can help automate extracting information from compliance-related documents for processes such as KYC, AML, and other regulatory requirements. This way, banks can comply with regulations more quickly and efficiently while reducing the risk of non-compliance.

Loan Processing

IDP can enable the extraction of information from loan applications and other related documents such as income statements, credit reports, and real estate appraisals. It can help automate the loan review process, making it faster and more accurate.

Fraud Detection

IDP can be used to extract information from documents and match it with other sources to detect potential fraud. In this way, banks can reduce the risk of fraud and losses.

IDP vs RPA

The choice of automation for document processing boils down to IDP vs. RPA. RPA and IDP are two different technologies used in automation but are sometimes confused with the other.

The main difference between RPA and IDP is that RPA does not have the native intelligence of AI. RPA cannot consume and analyze data on its own. RPA is limited to mimicking repetitive actions performed on computer screens with a mouse and a keyboard. It is helpful for tasks that don’t require high-level decision-making and is largely outdated. It is often said that AI is ‘the brain’ while and RPA is ‘the hands.’

On the other hand, IDP takes automation up a notch by automating documents and absorbing and understanding data to extract actionable insights. Thus, IDP can be considered the future of banking automation.

RPA works better with structured documents (e.g. claim forms, tax forms ) where IDP works better with unstructured documents (e.g. contracts, handwritten notes). Ideally, an organization should use a combination of RPA and IDP to achieve better operational efficiency.

What is OCR?

OCR is a technology used in both RPA and IDP, that reads, extracts, and converts data from images and scanned documents into text for electronic automation and importation. When integrated with automation solutions like IDP or RPA, OCR can efficiently process structured data, eliminating the need for manual data entry and thus minimizing errors. OCR technology also enhances image quality to produce more accurate results.

While OCR is a step towards automation, it is not very effective in processing unstructured data that most banking institutions deal with every day in large volumes.

IDP vs RPA vs OCR

Blanc Labs’ Document Processing Solutions for Banks

Blanc Labs’ helps financial institutions like banks, and credit unions fast-track their way to digital transformation. We can help you integrate powerful automation technologies into your processes to increase productivity and reduce manual labor and the scope for errors.

Our team provides a customized combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence for automating complicated tasks like document processing so that you can save your resources and provide faster and better financial services.

If your financial institution deals with a ton of documents every day, let us help you put your processing on auto. Book a discovery call with us today, and we will create a seamless document processing solution unique to your needs.