Intelligent automation fueling digital transformation in banking: Swedbank
Is intelligent automation fueling digital transformation in banking? Qorus and UIPath interviewed Sofia Dahbo, Chief Product Owner – Process Management & Automation at Swedbank, to find out more about the subject and what the Swedish bank is doing in terms of intelligent automation.
Is intelligent automation fueling digital transformation in banking? Qorus and UIPath interviewed Sofia Dahbo, Chief Product Owner – Process Management & Automation at Swedbank, to find out more about the subject and what the Swedish bank 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?
The terms intelligent automation and hyper-automation recently been introduced as a part of our vocabulary in our Tech Strategy and will most likely be introduced even more during the next two years. RPA and AI as separate technologies already play an important role today. Automation, which has been a part of our digitization journey for some years, is now one of the cornerstones of the Strategy, and will most likely be even more important as our capabilities mature. We see that the awareness and benefits IA can bring are now being spread in our organization on all levels.
To what extent do you think Intelligent automation is transforming banking today and will over the next two years?
It helps the bank and other companies to both become compliant and reduce risk in business processes and manual handling. IA both reduces customer lead time and allows bank employees to focus on the more value added tasks while digital workers do the more easy work. Also, combining IA with the increasing affordability of artificial intelligence tools such as OpenAI should lead to even greater advances in process automation and customer service.
What areas of your business have benefitted most from first generation intelligent automation technologies to date? Could you share an example of the most successful implemented project?
One of the areas we see is the regulatory area where many recent regulations, such as GDPR and KYC, have arisen. It is necessary to keep up with the regulatory demands and here process automation or intelligent automation has been as a perfect solution. IA has been seen as a ‘lifesaver’ since the development time can be reduced to a few weeks or months. This autumn, robotics was one of the prerequisites that made it possible for customers to apply for a service offering concept in a digital way, and we have successfully integrated robotics with our virtual assistant to manage card replacements, increasing efficiency for both the customers and the bank.
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.)?
The biggest obstacles right now are a lack of awareness of that the tools can support business in the transformation and not seeing IA as a natural tool to reach the strategical targets. This limits Automation. Swedbank have started to introduce automation as a first step while waiting for the digital long-term solution to be in place.
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?
In Swedbank we have only just started to apply some IA technologies and expect that as it becomes easier to use and apply, it will lead to broader utilization. One area in particular is the document handling and processing within customer service which we have already started. Hopefully this will be spread throughout the Contact Center to impact improved customer journeys and satisfaction with shortened response times.
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