OTP Group, one of the largest financial institutions in Central and Eastern Europe, is building out its network of automation centers among its subsidiaries in a move to modernize the bank’s siloed infrastructure.

Budapest-based OTP Bank has about $70 billion in assets, and regional subsidiaries across 11 different countries, from Slovenia to Russia and Ukraine to Albania. It offers financial services through commercial and retail banking, auto finance, investment, health care, pension funds, travel, factoring, real estate and mortgages.

Since launching its first Automation Competence Center in 2019, OTP Bank has been focused on developing local automation centers in its subsidiaries to optimize workflows and enhance its IT infrastructure, according to Zoltan Szoleczki, senior manager at OTP and head of the bank’s Automation Competence Center.

All the subsidiary countries are currently undergoing pilots or have begun to set up the centers and due to the nature of robotization, the teams can start with as few as four employees, Szoleczki said. His team provides resources and facilitates knowledge transfers, helping to stand up automation teams in countries across central and Eastern Europe. The bank takes a regional approach since many of the countries where OTP operates have different languages and regulations.

So far, Szoleczki’s center has automated 14 processes, mostly administrative, back-office functions like debt collection and account administration. The robotic processes create internal efficiencies and better customer experiences as the processes go through more quickly and with fewer errors, he said.

One example of such an efficiency is the creation of a document that verifies a customer’s current loan balances and debt, often needed for those applying for a new job or apartment lease; the formerly two-day human workflow process now takes about 40 minutes.

Another is related to government-issued moratoriums on retail debts and mortgages automatically applied during the coronavirus pandemic. Many financially stable customers didn’t want to accept the loan moratorium, so OTP stood up an automated process that allowed customers to cancel it online. Using the rule sets determined by humans, the bot evaluated the request, identified the customer need and forwarded the request to other IT systems, Szoleczki said. The first weekend it was set up was the Easter holiday in Hungary, and the bot processed 80,000 requests during the long weekend.

More holistically, the automation centers are also playing a major role in harmonizing OTP’s separate IT systems that span its subsidiaries, Szoleczki said. “If we are thinking about workflows, especially human-plus-robot workflows, this sounds good on paper but this all has to be carried out in dozens of IT systems in one process,” he said, noting a simple tasks like loan application and servicing include more than 30 systems in the background.

For systems too old to connect with APIs and other native integrations, robots, rather than humans, can be deployed to work with graphical user interfaces — the icons and different elements seen on a computer screen — to exchange data between systems.

The goal is to have humans work in concert with the bots, as in a car manufacturing plant.

“Currently either a job is done by a human employee or it is done by a robot. Either, or,” Szoleczki said. Ideally, “robot and human workforces should almost be indistinguishable in the sense they work together to do the best process possible, because if you leave out humans from the process then we have no value added from experience; and if we leave out robots, then processes become convoluted, slow and irregular,” he said.

The majority of banking and financial services companies in the CEE region are currently stumped at the experimentation, planning or piloting phases of integrating robotic process automation, and less than 15% have scaled up RPA to the point of full production, Szoleczki said. He added that this is mainly because “robotization sounds very good on paper and easy to execute — that’s the promise anyway — but in reality, it is a hard project as you have to tackle complexity in IT landscape, chaos in workflows and processes and cultural resistance from the organization.”

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