Customer Oriented Digital Process Automation Solutions with RPA and AI Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2025

Our RPA project at the bank is not just an automation initiative; it is a cornerstone of a strategic transformation shaping the future of banking. The core ideas and objectives of our project were shaped in the light of rapidly changing technology and customer expectations. At Akbank, our journey with rules-based RPA, which we began to revolutionize banking processes, has now been elevated to a new level by integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. Our goal is to move beyond automating repetitive processes to integrate "intelligent automation" into banking by automating complex tasks that require manual judgment through the power of AI. This is about providing not only speed but also quality and consistency in our decisions.

In this context, we established a center of excellence to primarily spread the adoption of RPA technology and positioned leaders to play a pioneering role. Through organized workshops, automation opportunities within business units were carefully identified, and comprehensive RPA training was provided to enable business units to independently develop automation projects. In this way, we brought an innovative dimension to our operational efficiency and rapid adaptation processes. We are focusing not just on today's needs but on tomorrow's as well. Through our pioneering steps in our Agentic AI journey, we are turning automation from a passive tool into a proactive and autonomous decision-making force. This opens the doors to a new era in banking and reinforces our vision of being at the forefront of change.

At the heart of our project is an unparalleled customer and employee experience. Despite the increasing workload, we consider it essential to offer our customers proactive, unique, and personalized experiences without compromising on service quality. With the combination of RPA and AI, we are increasing efficiency in operational processes and freeing our employees from routine workloads, allowing them to focus on more strategic and value-creating areas. This maximizes both customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

Our aim is to create cost advantages by significantly enhancing operational efficiency and utilizing our resources more effectively. At the same time, we minimize the potential for human error and standardize processes to significantly reduce operational risk. This not only reinforces our bank's stability but also provides more reliable service to our customers.

In summary, our project opens the doors to a new era in banking by combining technology with a human-centered vision. Our goal is not only to increase operational efficiency but also to build a proactive, excellent banking experience that adds value to the lives of every customer and employee and is ready for the future.

We approach our digital transformation journey with three main goals. When evaluating automation opportunities, our priority is to focus on processes that adversely affect the "customer experience and satisfaction." For example;

1.We prevented 3,300 hours of monthly service interruptions by instantly resetting out-of-service ATMs according to fault type to provide our customers with 24/7 uninterrupted ATM service. Previously, intervention could only occur during working hours, but now thanks to robots, overtime is not needed.

2.Customer requests and complaints (for example, ATM cash withdrawal/deposit disputes, card fee refunds, spending objections) are processed without waiting and promptly addressed by our virtual assistants (i.e., robots) to meet our customers' needs as quickly as possible.

3.Robots cater to the needs of our corporate clients, as well as individual customers. By quickly processing merchant application, installation, cancellation, update requests, and credit limit allocation processes, we increased customer experience and satisfaction.

By reducing operational activities with Next-Generation technologies, we direct our employees to more value-added tasks and ensure they maintain a healthy work-life balance.

In line with this, by transferring 200 hours of work to robots, we prevented overtime work. These include labor-intensive processes such as granting authorities in personnel recruitment, conducting credit risk assessments for our customers, creating early warning signals, preparing branch declarations, and legal notifications within a limited timeframe, and completing foreign currency transfers.

We enriched our RPA initiatives with new generation technologies to deliver end-to-end (E2E) digital experiences. With integrated solutions like new generation technologies, AI, etc., we achieved end-to-end automation in processes such as:

-The creation and dissemination of fund prices -Actimize controls in foreign trade transactions -Incoming/outgoing SWIFT controls -Card fee refund transactions -Appraisal requests -Chargeback Processes We made a significant impact on customer and employee experiences with next-generation technologies. As of today, we have a total of 24 virtual colleagues. We have equipped these colleagues with 26 different areas of expertise. They are actively involved in various processes, from credit and foreign trade to treasury and deposit transactions.

We collaborated with 23 different departments, automated over 100 processes, and enhanced more than 150 sub-processes across 26 different areas of expertise (such as Credit, Foreign Trade, Insurance, Merchant Services, ATM, Credit Cards). By integrating AI technologies (OCR, NLP Text Analytics, etc.), we created an additional capacity equivalent to over 200 Full-Time Employees (FTE) to focus on more value-added activities.

We preserved our employees' work/life balance by reducing monthly overtime hours by 500. We prevented 3,300 hours of service interruptions per month to provide uninterrupted service to our customers 24/7. We achieved an annual revenue increase of 170 million TL and cost savings of 1 million TL. We also alleviated legal risks worth 200 million TL.

By integrating RPA&AI technology, over 500 automation opportunities were identified, and more than 100 processes were automated.