Not Just for Big Fish: How Intelligent Automation Benefits Regional Banks

By Noel Grant, HuLoop Vice President of Sales

With the failure of SVB bank threatening a potential financial crisis, regional banks face mounting pressure to stay competitive, streamline operations and increase efficiencies—all while keeping financial solvency at the forefront of clients’ minds. Intelligent automation can help regional banks focus more resources on maintaining high liquidity and financial strength by automating and ultimately improving other business functions, while reducing costs and increasing productivity. This article will explore how regional banks can benefit from intelligent automation, and provide examples and business benefits of functions that can be improved.

Banking business processes are made up of hundreds of repetitive and mundane tasks and activities that must work across disparate enterprise software platforms, data sources and organizational boundaries. HuLoop’s intelligent automation platform helps regional banks increase productivity, reduce expenses and optimize human capital by doing the following:

• Eliminating non-value adding tasks or activities
• Automating mundane, repetitive tasks with bots
• Facilitating intelligent document handling
• Orchestrating across existing enterprise software
• Providing Human-in-the-Loop governance

By providing an AI-based, no-code intelligent automation platform, HuLoop empowers both technical and non-technical users to inject human emotional intelligence and decision-making into critical business functions. Automation capabilities include:

• Data-Driven Process Discovery – Generates understanding of how people, processes, and technologies are being used and what happens in between them.
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – Building, deploying and managing software robots—aka bots—or digital assistants that emulate what humans would otherwise need to do.
• Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) – Loading, digitizing, classifying, extracting, redacting, validating and exporting intelligence from documents and files.
• Business Process Automation (BPA) – Orchestration and automation of complex processes across disparate systems.
• Intelligent Data Automation (IDA) – Collecting, validating and publishing data automatically.
• Software Test Automation (STA) – Creating, executing and analyzing an array of tests comparing actual expected outcomes.

Intelligent automation can deliver significant benefits for regional banks across the entire organization. Examples of how regional banking organizations can benefit include:

Improved Customer Service: With intelligent automation, regional banks can provide faster, more accurate and more personalized service to their customers. For example, digital workers (or “bots”) can answer common customer inquiries instantly, freeing up customer service agents to handle more complex issues. This can lead to higher customer satisfaction rates and increased customer loyalty.

Increased Efficiency: By automating routine tasks such as data entry, document processing and account opening, regional banks can reduce manual errors, eliminate bottlenecks, and increase throughput. This can lead to faster processing times, reduced operational costs and increased capacity to handle more transactions.

Enhanced Compliance: With intelligent automation, regional banks can ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and reduce the risk of errors and omissions. For example, digital workers can automatically review loan applications to ensure that they meet all regulatory requirements, which reduces the risk of non-compliance and potential fines.

Greater Agility: With intelligent automation, regional banks can respond more quickly to changing market conditions and customer demands. For example, they can rapidly develop and launch new products, services, and promotions, using data-driven insights to improve decision-making.

Improved Employee Engagement: By automating routine tasks, regional bank employees can focus on more creative, high-value tasks, leading to greater job satisfaction and reduced turnover. This can also free up time for employees to engage in training and professional development, leading to improved skills and competencies.

There are many overarching benefits to implementing intelligent automation across a regional banking system. Below are some specific and relevant ways that banks can put intelligent automation to practice in their organization:

Loan Processing: Loan processing involves a series of repetitive, manual tasks such as data entry, document processing, and verification. With intelligent automation, regional banks can automate these tasks, reducing processing times and eliminating errors. For example, digital workers can automatically extract data from loan applications, verify the data against existing records, and flag any inconsistencies or errors for further review. This can lead to faster loan processing times, reduced operational costs, and increased customer satisfaction.

Account Opening: Similar to loan processing, account opening also involves many manual tasks. Intelligent automation enables banks to automate the account opening process to reduce processing times and ensure zero errors. Digital workers automatically extract data from account applications, verify the data and flag any inconsistencies or errors. Ultimately, this results in faster account opening times, reduced operational costs, and increased customer satisfaction.

Fraud Detection: With intelligent automation, banks can automate the manual data entry, data analysis and investigation tasks involved with fraud detection. This reduces the risk of fraud and the associated costs. Digital workers, for example, can automatically review transactions, identify anomalies, and flag suspicious activities for further review. This can lead to faster detection and response times, as well as reduced operational costs.

Credit Checks: Regional banks often need to perform credit checks on potential borrowers before approving a loan. With intelligent automation, regional banks can automate this process, reducing the time and effort required to perform credit checks. This can lead to faster loan approvals, improved risk management and increased customer satisfaction.

Compliance Reporting: Banks are subject to various regulatory requirements, and compliance reporting can be a time-consuming, complex process. With intelligent automation, regional banks can automate compliance reporting, reducing the risk of errors and omissions. This can lead to improved regulatory compliance, reduced operational costs and increased capacity to handle more compliance tasks.

Account Maintenance: Account maintenance involves a series of repetitive tasks such as updating customer information, changing account settings and processing requests. With intelligent automation, regional banks can automate these tasks, reducing processing times and eliminating errors. This can lead to improved customer service, reduced operational costs and increased productivity.

Document Management: Regional banks often need to manage large volumes of documents such as loan applications, customer agreements, and compliance reports. With intelligent automation, regional banks can automate document management, reducing the time and effort required to manage and process documents. This can lead to improved document accuracy, reduced storage costs and increased productivity.

Customer Onboarding: Customer onboarding involves tasks such as verifying identity, setting up accounts and issuing debit cards. With intelligent automation, regional banks can automate customer onboarding, reducing processing times and improving customer satisfaction. This can lead to improved customer retention, reduced operational costs and increased capacity to handle more customer onboarding requests.

Account Reconciliations: Account reconciliations require comparing account balances, verifying transactions and resolving discrepancies. With intelligent automation, regional banks can automate account reconciliations, reducing the time and effort required to perform these tasks. This can lead to improved accuracy, reduced errors and increased productivity.

Loan Servicing: Loan servicing involves a series of tasks such as payment processing, late payment notifications and delinquency management. With intelligent automation, regional banks can automate loan servicing, reducing processing times and improving customer satisfaction. This can lead to improved loan performance, reduced operational costs and increased capacity to handle more loan servicing requests.

Marketing Campaigns: Regional banks often need to run marketing campaigns to promote their products and services. Intelligent automation enables banks to automate marketing campaigns, reducing the time and effort required to plan and execute campaigns. This can lead to improved campaign performance, reduced marketing costs and increased capacity to create and manage more marketing campaigns.

Cash Management: Cash management tasks include cash counting, cash handling and cash reconciliation. With intelligent automation, regional banks can automate cash management, reducing the time and effort required to manage and process cash. This can lead to improved accuracy, reduced errors and increased productivity.

Business Analytics: Regional banks need to analyze large volumes of data to make informed business decisions. With intelligent automation, regional banks can automate business analytics, which leads to improved decision-making and reduced operational costs.

Regional banks can benefit greatly from the deployment of intelligent automation. By automating tasks that are repetitive, time-consuming and error-prone, banking institutions can achieve significant improvements in operational efficiency, productivity, customer satisfaction and cost savings. With the help of intelligent automation, regional banks can streamline processes, reduce processing times, and free up staff to focus on higher-value tasks that require human judgment and expertise.

The benefits of intelligent automation are numerous, ranging from improved risk management to enhanced compliance, faster loan processing to improved customer service, and reduced operational costs to increased capacity to handle more tasks. With growing market uncertainty and evolving customer needs, intelligent automation can help banks stay ahead of the curve by enabling them to offer faster, more efficient, and more personalized services to their customers.

Based in the Sacramento, California area, HuLoop Automation serves enterprises who are digitally transforming their businesses to maximize human productivity and improve customer experience, all while leveraging existing technology investments. HuLoop has built a unified automation platform to help enterprises automate manual, mundane tasks, so their human talent is able to spend time on higher value work. Our AI-based, codeless, Human-in-the-Loop software eliminates mind-numbing work, saving our clients money and improving employee satisfaction. You can learn more at www.huloop.ai and follow HuLoop on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.