JJ Hornblass
Hi everyone, I’m JJ Hornblass and welcome to the newly christened The Buzz from Bank Automation News. Formerly known as Bank Innovation at Bank Automation News. We are committed to helping the banking industry adopt automation technologies and strategies. This is our weekly wrap for what’s happening in the industry this week. Before I begin, I want to thank bank automation news, advertisers, Snowflake and Fiserv for their support. And I am so pleased to be joined by Bianca Chen and Loraine Lawson. From the new bank automation news. We’ll talk about that in just a moment. It is Friday, January 22 2021. Of course, on Wednesday, Joe Biden Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States, President Biden immediately began tackling some of the biggest problems of the day, notably the covid 19 pandemic. About 900,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits last week, as the labor market continued to struggle to recover this winter. That’s according to data that was released just today. The number of jobless claims last week was down slightly from the week ending January 9, when applications jumped more than 100,000 to 926,000. Also, the United States reported 4200 deaths on Wednesday from the Coronavirus, this was the second highest daily number in the United States. To date since the pandemic started. tech stocks lifted US stock indexes to records on Wednesday, with the NASDAQ rising 2%. And this was led by Netflix, which enjoyed a 17% jump in its stock price after news broke that it ended last year with more than 200 million subscribers. That’s a million. But perhaps most importantly, or at least to US Bank innovation rebranded to bank automation news this week. And that’s going to be the subject of our podcast today. why we chose to abandon the bank innovation brand that we had established in 2009. For bank automation news, I think the first place to start when we talk about this is just the context. What is happening in banking innovation, in let’s call it the last 12 to 24 months. I mean, let’s let’s focus on the fact that in banking innovation, it has the banking innovation has spread to every facet of the financial institution. There is arguably not a financial institution today that does not have a banking innovation strategy budget, at least even the first small institute a team member dedicated to it, it has begun become pervasive. He would you say that was Would you agree with that Bianca?Bianca Chan
I would it’s become so pervasive to the point where it’s almost it’s like a, like a blunt term. Now it’s almost too broad. What constitutes innovation? Seems like every single technological advancement is like innovation. Right? SoJJ Hornblass
yeah, so I think you know, when we started, it was obviously the complete opposite. The term itself was, you know, not even. I remember when we started, people thought it was a complete oxymoron, that we would put the word bank and innovation together, somebody called me to tell me that and I thought, well, that’s a good sign for us. But now, it’s completely ubiquitous. I mean, that but the part that’s not ubiquitous is the automation. Let’s talk a little bit about like, what’s the underpinning here like what’s happening in technology that is pointing to a banking automation revolution.Bianca Chan
Well, Certainly the the surge in digital banking, just usage across web and mobile that we’ve seen in the past year over the pandemic, just due to social distancing, branch closures and whatnot. I also think the rise of self service tools, self service banking tools is also contributing to this, I guess increase in investment of automation technology. Certainly anything that has to do with scale or handling large volumes of, of, I guess any sort of requests or transactions coming in automation obviously plays a huge, a huge factor in that as well.JJ Hornblass
All cost has come down for these kinds of technologies. And the notion of being able to, you know, eliminate repetitive transactions at scale. is, you know, in our view, to appealing to ignore, even if you’re a small institution, and now, while a small institution today might not adopt that technology, yet. You know, I think our view is, is that they will, I mean, Lorraine, you were you did some reporting this week on the PPP. And you saw, and that’s also been a driver of like more immediate automation. Is that what, like, what did you find?Loraine Lawson
Certainly, one of the things that I thought was interesting is that PPP actually did drive adoption of robotic process automation. And a lot of companies chose to stand up their PPP solutions with that. So actually, it for a lot of bass, that was the first time they had used that technology, according to Gartner. Also, you were talking about why pivot? I mean, to me, innovation in banks right now is automation. And that’s backed up by research that shows that banks lead the way when it comes to industries in terms of what they’re automating Gartner, research shows that financial services lead the pack when it came to automation. And a recent report from automation anywhere showed that they lead the way on RPA adoption across industries.JJ Hornblass
Why do you think that is Bianca?Bianca Chan
Well, I think the maybe just the pure nature of banking, a lot of the processes like we’ve said transactions are right for automation, you maybe don’t need that employee to take, you know, Excel, sell a one and put it into another system. And be too Let’s say, another interesting thing that I saw Lorraine in, in your reporting of that automation, anywhere report was that the measurable return was two and a half times the overall cost of the RPA investment, which is very interesting, because in our recent reporting, we’ve heard from a lot of community and smaller financial institutions, that causes a huge barrier to entry in terms of getting involved in automation technology, or RPA, specifically. So it’s kind of interesting, that that data point that automation anywhere kind of brought up in that, you know, eventually it is actually more cost efficient, let’s say. So leverage is sort of technology,JJ Hornblass
I think you’ve also got like a, you have a, you know, a confluence of factors that are coming into play. I mean, you know, clearly the pandemic, as both of you have indicated, has really forced innovation. This is not just in banking. I mean, we’ve seen this in other sectors, forced, forced into enterprises to kind of go where they’re uncomfortable, in various whether it’s work from home, whether it’s from a sales standpoint, whether it’s just products at or even timelines, force because of poor financial results that they needed to put things forward to try to make, you know, make up for revenue shortfalls. So that that factor is is you know, kind of this underpinning, but the other factor that’s come in is that, you know, this data, this data, drive in financial services that started I don’t know, five years ago, that’s a real intensive effort to clean up data source stores, improve data accessibility, and even just, you know, pursue data collection at a greater skip has kind of mature to the point where you can marry this impetus with the data that’s become available and really present Use meaningful automation initiatives. You know, there’s this like data expression, you know, garbage in, garbage out, right? You know that they, they say that if you have garbage data, you’re gonna have a garbage result from it. But the quality of data has improved in financial services markedly over the over the last many years. It’s not perfect, certainly not perfect at every every institution. But the fact that data quality has improved, has met has allowed them to sort of more gravitate towards automation initiatives. Mm hmm.

Bianca Chan
Yeah. And the other kind of piece that we’re seeing recent trends in terms of data are kind of grabbing, like proactive insights for customers, whether that be you know, consumer or business customers. So the data piece is obviously huge in that, but also automating the delivery of those insights. And setting up an action or an action that can be easily taken is kind of the other side of the coin that we’ve seen, where a lot of banks are making headway.

JJ Hornblass
Yeah, I think I think the other reason why, you know, we’re going kind of all in on on banking automation as well is because it will have profound effects on inter organizational dynamics, the communication between institutions where you don’t necessarily have the ability to mandate a certain practice or process elsewhere. But if you pursue an you know, a technology automation solution, that that, that means there’s a more seamless a better result in an inter company dynamic when companies are working with each other. So there are many, there are many app, we even get into the whole back end, infrastructure side of things, self curing of technology, and so on. But we’re very excited about the new pivot. I know Lorraine and Bianca are very excited to be reporting it. And we’re so happy to bring this to all of you. And look forward to your comments, and look forward to our coverage of this really dynamic and exciting sector within technology as it evolves. We’re really looking forward to it evolving with your help and input in the near term. We’ve got some news coverage scheduled for next week. Bianca, do you want to share that with everyone?

Bianca Chan
Sure, yeah, we’ll be looking at that the budget dynamic amongst smaller financial institutions and how they’re justifying, let’s say the the investment of automation technology. We’ll also be speaking with a Santander executive about some payments on nations. They have ramping up there so can look forward to that. Good.

JJ Hornblass
And, again, thank you all so much for joining us on the new buzz. We hope you like it. And please let us know what you think of it. You can email us at info at Bank automation news.com and, and still always visit us at on Twitter and LinkedIn. And of course, be sure to visit the new bank automation news.com. We’ll see you there and we’ll see you next time on the Buzz.