The Impact of Robotic Process Automation in Financial Services

Robotic process automation, or RPA, is software that uses artificial intelligence to handle tasks. Today, RPA is being used in several fields, including health care and telecommunications.

But the use of Robotic Process Automation in financial services surpasses the rest of its uses. Take the example of approving and funding a home mortgage.

RPA can handle application processing, background checking, credit checking, assessment of the property, and approval. When we compare RPA handling with doing the same process manually, RPA offers much more accuracy and efficiency.

In addition to the above-mentioned example, people have used RPA for the following services:

• Order-to-cash, record-to-report, and procure-to-pay services
• Management of accounts payable, travel and expense processes, and vendor statement reporting
• Journal reconciliations by accountants
• Management of unapplied cash, intercompany transactions, and creation of consolidated reports

5 Phases

But these tasks do not portray the actual potential of RPA. Forrester mentions five phases regarding the maturity of technologies.

These five phases are:

1. Creation in the labs
2. Survival in the market
3. Growth as adoption takes off
4. Equilibrium from the installed base
5. Decline into obsolescence

According to these phases, RPA is still in the first one, i.e., the creation phase. For example, we can use spreadsheets for diverse purposes, such as financial transactions, monitoring a recruitment pipeline, or planning a wedding.

Various Uses of Robotic Process Automation

Similarly, with more advancement, RPA will grow more sophisticated. It will employ (and in some cases is already employing) artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive computing, or a combination of all those abilities.

In the market, we currently have IBM’s Watson, which uses RPA related tools with cognitive capabilities. This computer is highly efficient in terms of sorting huge amounts of data, even unstructured data like emails.

Watson not only infers, reasons, and interprets natural language but also makes probabilistic determinations. Several organizations are now using Watson to look for lower cost, alternative vendors.

Moreover, such technology also can improve invoice processing. Using AI and machine learning, RPA can handle the verification of the business, the vendors, and the procurement organizations.

RPA will ensure the delivery of correct products and services to the receiving parties. With the ability to learn from its own decisions, it can also make fairly accurate future predictions about certain needs pertaining to products or services.

Credit card fraud detection is another common use of RPA’s machine learning. RPA can help detect when there is a suspicious use of a card.

RPA is also behind personal digital assistants such as Siri (Apple) and Cortana (Microsoft). These assistants have been open-sourced, allowing the development of advanced RPA capabilities that are based on speech-recognition technology.

Take Advantage of It Now

If you are wondering about how difficult it would be to learn about and utilize RPA, we should note that dedicated technologies are not necessary in order to accomplish the huge amount of tasks that RPA can accomplish in the area financial services alone.

RPA is our tomorrow and the sooner we benefit from the countless services it offers, the better it is for our overall progress.

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Umair Maqsood

Umair Maqsood is a Digital Marketing Consultant. Technology inspires him, Digital is his passion and writing is what he envy the most. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn.

Latest posts by Umair Maqsood (see all)

• The Impact of Robotic Process Automation in Financial Services - September 11, 2017