Intelligent automation fueling digital transformation in banking: CaixaBank
Is intelligent automation fueling digital transformation in banking? Qorus and UIPath interviewed Ramón Aliaga, IS Director for Financial Subsidiaries at CaixaBank, to find out more about the subject and what CaixaBank is doing in terms of intelligent automation.
Is intelligent automation fueling digital transformation in banking? Qorus and UIPath interviewed Ramón Aliaga, IS Director for Financial Subsidiaries at CaixaBank, to find out more about the subject and what CaixaBank is doing in terms of intelligent automation.
How big a part does intelligent automation play in your organization’s digital transformation strategy today, and how much will that change in the next two years?
One of the main goals from our Strategic Plan for the period 2022-2024 is based on the improvement of business process in terms of customer quality service and efficiency. As a support to achieve this goal, intelligent automation is part of the basis of the IT Strategic Plan for the same period. Data mining, process mining, BPM, robotics and machine learning are all technologies that we are using to re-engineer our business process technical implementation to achieve this goal.
Three KPIs are being monitored during this period to size the goal achievement: process design based on event management, end-to-end process design, and task automation.
To what extent do you think intelligent automation is transforming banking today and will over the next two years?
Banking entities are closing branches every year. Customers use self-service channels more and more every year to carry out their needs. Even cash operations are being replaced by many different types of electronic fund transfers, not only through cards. Also, regulations are becoming more and more complex for financial institutions, becoming a real headache for banks and as huge to manage as the number of customers you have and the number of different countries you operate in.
It is impossible to provide services in this way, improving customer service quality and efficiency, without using intelligent automation.
Intelligent automation is a solution to this issue, and the use of it is also bringing new business opportunities to banking, like customer behavior prediction or resource planning, using continuous refeeding of data.
What areas of your business have benefited most from first generation intelligent automation technologies to date? Could you share an example of the most successful implemented project?
Operational services and customer channels.
Examples of successful intelligent automation implementation in our bank include the processing of subsidized loan concessions and credit payment moratoriums in accordance with government legislation due to Covid-19. In three months (Q2 of year 2020), millions of applications had to be processed, in a context of frequent changes to legal specifications, affecting the conditions and ways to implement. Intelligent document recognition, BPM, business rules management system and robotics were combined to give responses in the requested time.
In your opinion, what are the main obstacles in gaining scaled benefit from intelligent automation? (Too many competing priorities, IT resistance, insufficient return on investment, etc.?)
Regulation, legacy systems and, in some business areas, lack of trust in intelligent automation.
We see that Automation 2.0 (newer IA technologies) is now getting a wider adoption in banking – what impact are these technologies having now / will they have in the next two years? Which areas of your business do you think will benefit most from them?
Intelligent automation in banking is being used more and more every day. Every week we receive in IT petitions from business areas that are new users of this technology.
The short-term challenge for us is to industrialize the service to ease the use and to get the benefits for all in the minimum time, with minimum cost. Now the demand volume of this technology needs to do that, turning intelligent automation into a must-have instead of a nice-to-have service.
Can you specify some of the key issues that you are facing with IT application testing (cost, manual nature of the work, release time, employee experience, quality issues/defects)?
The traditional IT application lifecycle needs to be modified. Automatic IT application testing is being implemented in our organization. Previous environments and end-to-end consideration to test a business process (implemented not only on one application but several) are key issues to manage it. Automation of application testing helps us to avoid the difficulties that these issues give us.
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