Weekly Wrap: Blend’s new acquisition, and Automation Anywhere joins forces with Google Cloud
A discussion of the increased role and cost of intelligent automation
This week, Bank Automation News explored the state of automation in mortgage lending and the three stages of intelligent automation, which combines robot process automation (RPA) with artificial intelligence (AI).
In related news, mortgage solution provider Blend, which automates aspects of the mortgage process, acquired title insurance and settlement company Title365, for $500 million. Meanwhile, RPA vendor Automation Anywhere partnered with Google to build out AI-infused RPA products together.
The BAN team also discussed whether more complex technologies could prove a cost deterrent to banks seeking to automate, and debated the role of the cloud in making advanced automations more cost-efficient.
Find this and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap, featuring CEO JJ Hornblass and Associate Editors Jaspreet Kalra and Loraine Lawson.
Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.
Subscribe to The Buzz Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or download the episode.
The following is a transcript generated by AI technology that has been lightly edited but still contains errors.
JJ Hornblass
Hi everyone, I’m JJ Hornblass and welcome to The Buzz from Bank Automation News, where we chart the future of banking automation technology. This is our Weekly Wrap for what’s happening in the banking automation industry for March 19, 2021. Before beginning I want to thank bank automation is advertisers MX and then Vena Solutions for their support. So thank you to them. And I’m pleased to be joined by Loraine Lawson and Jaspreet Kalra from the Bank Automation News editorial team. Hello to both of you. In general economic news: Today the US economic recovery is picking up steam as Americans increase their spending particularly on in person services that have been hurt so badly by Coronavirus, the coronavirus pandemic, The Wall Street Journal reported restaurant and hotel bookings are up. airplane tickets are selling fast consumers spend more on gyms, salons and spas in recent weeks than they have since the pandemic started. Also, jobless claims are hovering near the pandemic’s lowest levels. That’s at 6.2%. Now, and that’s further evidence of recent economic improvement, both very good signs for all of us and the final good sign for the economy. FedEx said yesterday, it’s that its quarterly earnings. That’s the quarter that ended February 28. their earnings nearly tripled and revenue jumped 23%. As the pandemics spurred e commerce in banking, automation, industry news, Intelligent Automation in mortgage finance has clearly come and advancement is coming in that space in many different ways. We reported on it starting yesterday and will continue to be reporting on developments in mortgage finance automation. Loraine, please start by sharing with us kind of the general background or the general developments that you’ve found in mortgage finance automation.Loraine Lawson
Yes, so in some ways mortgage finance automation is a little bit behind the times but changes coming according to Forrester’s Craig Le Claire, he, he ends panel of experts that were on housing wires, recent webinars said that we weren’t quite there, but we will soon be disrupted by what they call Intelligent Automation. That’s the combination of AI with our AI with robots. So marrying that will get us further down the technological roadmap right now, they identified three stages. Stage One is really rooted in task automation. So very basic, we’ve seen that with bots and the bank’s automating processes that that humans typically did. But, you know, we are now entering stage two, which is enhanced digitalization, and that includes things like invoicing and email management and document handling handling. It uses technologies such as optical character recognition, natural language, understanding where she rules and she learning and rules, more more advanced rules. So that would put us come looking ahead to stage three, which would have exceptional exception handling and decision management. So that’s getting closer to where you could do under some underwriting automation there.JJ Hornblass
Sp What have you found in your reporting recently as it relates to mortgage automation?Jaspreet Kalra
Okay, so from what I’ve been able to find so far about mortgage automation is that right now, a lot of companies are looking towards processes that can be easily quantified and translated over to a computer as compared to say embarking on large scale projects that involve more complicated subjects like AI or using a computer to make decisions. Right now it’s about say, keeping people off the phones or keeping people off chat. So that say a customer has a straightforward question about an interest rate, why not let a computer on so that it instead of having a human involved, on the other end, you also have underwriting process software’s evolving in a way so that they can more, more effectively crunch data and make the have the human make decisions instead of having the human crunch data themselves and then make a decision on it. So it’s more of an efficiency proposition right now as compared to an overall you know, undoing of the process proposition.JJ Hornblass
I think that the decisioning the data usage, has significant implications. And so I can, I can see that kind of momentum, continuing the momentum that I wonder about, and I don’t know what you both think about this, but is is related to this, sort of stage two, stage three, that is not necessarily data and decisioning oriented, like you were mentioning Jaspreet, because the in the efficiency gains that they can receive, just by the call it stage one, you know, blocking and tackling automation is so significant. And things generally tend to kind of develop so slowly, in financial services. I mean, this might be a, you know, they’re, they might be working in this area for a really long time. And, and the the notion of kind of getting to this kind of enterprise wide Intelligent Automation, maybe they just want to have the, you know, the the drive or financial incentive to really go beyond that, is there, is there a sense that there is momentum to kind of get beyond this efficiency stage? Or is it, there’s plenty to do, and itJaspreet Kalra
would depend on the return on investment expectations. Now, this is a story that I covered earlier in the week, which talked about how you about Microsoft are leading the sort of, you know, RPA charge along with a lot of other vendors. But at the same time, what companies are now realizing is that large scale products fail large scale enterprises, when they move to Gods, they also need a team to manage the ball. So somebody is going to go there as well. So that’s why it has sort of tampin dry expectations that companies usually have with RPA. So I think that’s going to be a very important factor to watch considering what’s the cost benefit analysis, the companies do themselves, how beneficial is it versus what sort of efficiency we can get out? So I mean, cost is going to be a critical factor.JJ Hornblass
Yeah. And in the other eye, that’s a great point. And the other thing, the other thing about it is, is that outsourcing this development to third parties in banking has historically has historically had very, very strong third party technology companies that have kind of dictated the the Technology Roadmap for a large population of financial solutions, you know, kind of losing that control to means that you’re also losing control of the cost basis for these technologies. And I wonder also whether, you know, to what degree will, uh, you know, a UI path or whatever be able to, you know, assume so much leverage on the, on the financial institution, that the incentive to get beyond the basic automation, at least, let’s say in mortgage where there’s just so much paper and documentation that’s required? Do they have that kind of motivation?Loraine Lawson
You know, I think it’s gonna, I think it’s gonna be on the vendors to make it affordable and appealing. And I do think the vendors are working on that, with cloud offerings, and, you know, doing things at scale, recently, Lind announced it was acquiring title 365. And blend is sort of active in the automation. It’s a technology platform used to automate mortgage, some aspects of mortgage and title 365. their expertise is in title escrow and settlement. So they’re going to be looking to bring that onto their platform. So that’s, you know, a way in which we’ll see and they’re very cloud based. So we’ll see, I think banks looking to the cloud to to achieve a scale of efficiencies.JJ Hornblass
Yes, we do want to add something.
Hi everyone, I’m JJ Hornblass and welcome to The Buzz from Bank Automation News, where we chart the future of banking automation technology. This is our Weekly Wrap for what’s happening in the banking automation industry for March 19, 2021. Before beginning I want to thank bank automation is advertisers MX and then Vena Solutions for their support. So thank you to them. And I’m pleased to be joined by Loraine Lawson and Jaspreet Kalra from the Bank Automation News editorial team. Hello to both of you. In general economic news: Today the US economic recovery is picking up steam as Americans increase their spending particularly on in person services that have been hurt so badly by Coronavirus, the coronavirus pandemic, The Wall Street Journal reported restaurant and hotel bookings are up. airplane tickets are selling fast consumers spend more on gyms, salons and spas in recent weeks than they have since the pandemic started. Also, jobless claims are hovering near the pandemic’s lowest levels. That’s at 6.2%. Now, and that’s further evidence of recent economic improvement, both very good signs for all of us and the final good sign for the economy. FedEx said yesterday, it’s that its quarterly earnings. That’s the quarter that ended February 28. their earnings nearly tripled and revenue jumped 23%. As the pandemics spurred e commerce in banking, automation, industry news, Intelligent Automation in mortgage finance has clearly come and advancement is coming in that space in many different ways. We reported on it starting yesterday and will continue to be reporting on developments in mortgage finance automation. Loraine, please start by sharing with us kind of the general background or the general developments that you’ve found in mortgage finance automation.Loraine Lawson
Yes, so in some ways mortgage finance automation is a little bit behind the times but changes coming according to Forrester’s Craig Le Claire, he, he ends panel of experts that were on housing wires, recent webinars said that we weren’t quite there, but we will soon be disrupted by what they call Intelligent Automation. That’s the combination of AI with our AI with robots. So marrying that will get us further down the technological roadmap right now, they identified three stages. Stage One is really rooted in task automation. So very basic, we’ve seen that with bots and the bank’s automating processes that that humans typically did. But, you know, we are now entering stage two, which is enhanced digitalization, and that includes things like invoicing and email management and document handling handling. It uses technologies such as optical character recognition, natural language, understanding where she rules and she learning and rules, more more advanced rules. So that would put us come looking ahead to stage three, which would have exceptional exception handling and decision management. So that’s getting closer to where you could do under some underwriting automation there.JJ Hornblass
Sp What have you found in your reporting recently as it relates to mortgage automation?Jaspreet Kalra
Okay, so from what I’ve been able to find so far about mortgage automation is that right now, a lot of companies are looking towards processes that can be easily quantified and translated over to a computer as compared to say embarking on large scale projects that involve more complicated subjects like AI or using a computer to make decisions. Right now it’s about say, keeping people off the phones or keeping people off chat. So that say a customer has a straightforward question about an interest rate, why not let a computer on so that it instead of having a human involved, on the other end, you also have underwriting process software’s evolving in a way so that they can more, more effectively crunch data and make the have the human make decisions instead of having the human crunch data themselves and then make a decision on it. So it’s more of an efficiency proposition right now as compared to an overall you know, undoing of the process proposition.JJ Hornblass
I think that the decisioning the data usage, has significant implications. And so I can, I can see that kind of momentum, continuing the momentum that I wonder about, and I don’t know what you both think about this, but is is related to this, sort of stage two, stage three, that is not necessarily data and decisioning oriented, like you were mentioning Jaspreet, because the in the efficiency gains that they can receive, just by the call it stage one, you know, blocking and tackling automation is so significant. And things generally tend to kind of develop so slowly, in financial services. I mean, this might be a, you know, they’re, they might be working in this area for a really long time. And, and the the notion of kind of getting to this kind of enterprise wide Intelligent Automation, maybe they just want to have the, you know, the the drive or financial incentive to really go beyond that, is there, is there a sense that there is momentum to kind of get beyond this efficiency stage? Or is it, there’s plenty to do, and itJaspreet Kalra
would depend on the return on investment expectations. Now, this is a story that I covered earlier in the week, which talked about how you about Microsoft are leading the sort of, you know, RPA charge along with a lot of other vendors. But at the same time, what companies are now realizing is that large scale products fail large scale enterprises, when they move to Gods, they also need a team to manage the ball. So somebody is going to go there as well. So that’s why it has sort of tampin dry expectations that companies usually have with RPA. So I think that’s going to be a very important factor to watch considering what’s the cost benefit analysis, the companies do themselves, how beneficial is it versus what sort of efficiency we can get out? So I mean, cost is going to be a critical factor.JJ Hornblass
Yeah. And in the other eye, that’s a great point. And the other thing, the other thing about it is, is that outsourcing this development to third parties in banking has historically has historically had very, very strong third party technology companies that have kind of dictated the the Technology Roadmap for a large population of financial solutions, you know, kind of losing that control to means that you’re also losing control of the cost basis for these technologies. And I wonder also whether, you know, to what degree will, uh, you know, a UI path or whatever be able to, you know, assume so much leverage on the, on the financial institution, that the incentive to get beyond the basic automation, at least, let’s say in mortgage where there’s just so much paper and documentation that’s required? Do they have that kind of motivation?Loraine Lawson
You know, I think it’s gonna, I think it’s gonna be on the vendors to make it affordable and appealing. And I do think the vendors are working on that, with cloud offerings, and, you know, doing things at scale, recently, Lind announced it was acquiring title 365. And blend is sort of active in the automation. It’s a technology platform used to automate mortgage, some aspects of mortgage and title 365. their expertise is in title escrow and settlement. So they’re going to be looking to bring that onto their platform. So that’s, you know, a way in which we’ll see and they’re very cloud based. So we’ll see, I think banks looking to the cloud to to achieve a scale of efficiencies.JJ Hornblass
Yes, we do want to add something.
Jaspreet Kalra
Yeah, I mean, the cloud point is going to be the space to watch because you seeing leading cloud providers redoubled on their investment plans, like Google yesterday announced that they will be putting down $7 billion in offices and data management centers in the United States, which basically means you’re going to see a lot of activity happening around clouds. And earlier this week, Automation Anywhere, you get, again, a big IP vendor just announced that Google Cloud is partnering the two of them apart, during and they will be building out RPA products together, building out AI infused RPA products together and also that Google Cloud will serve as automation anyways, primary cloud vendor. So I think the space for cloud market shares is going to be an interesting space to watch as we move towards more automation or say more even more AI infused technologies.
JJ Hornblass
I mean, I look I understand what both of you’re saying right that the cloud Economics kind of generally are a counterbalance to to escalating costs, but you can’t assume that that’s going to be the case, you can assume that it will continue to be the case that it may very well be that a kind of corner gets turned and the wet, especially when you get to Intelligent Automation. And and you’re really, you know, seeing, as you described it, Loraine, you know, like really going to enterprise decision and coming out of an automated that, I mean, it who, if you’re the vendor who is controlling the enterprise, or you know, decisioning, for a financial institution, I think you’ve got a lot of leverage for institution. And, and I wonder, you know, whether that even even with cloud kind of pushing down the cost basis, whether that necessarily means that costs will continue to slow down, or, or whether they’ll go up?
Loraine Lawson
Well, and those subscriptions, once you get onto them, they don’t usually stay static. So some companies have actually started to hire people to manage the cost of their services, their cloud services, because they, you know, it’s just like Netflix, it goes up by a few dollars every, every couple of months, it seems like so those costs don’t stay static. So that’s something else that will be interesting to watch is as these vendors gain more control of the IT systems. At what point did they become indispensable and like a utility and sort of be able to raise costs when they want?
JJ Hornblass
Right? Yeah, I think I think the I think it’s the Open, open automation dynamic that is going to be crucial because the more financial, the more flexibility a financial institution has to bring in other vendors, the less leverage those those major automation vendors have. And and that’ll be a counterbalance to make sure that the industry kind of continues on a positive innovation trajectory when it comes to banking automation, but time will tell. So we’re we’re not going to solve that today. It is in the meantime, we have our bank automation ignite conference coming up on April 13 214. I actually did a prep call yesterday with Justin Han seikar of keybank. He is in charge of all of wellness and originations experience, and a key is going to be talking about automation in customer experience should be an excellent presentation and just one of many so hope you will join us. Visit bank automation ignite calm for details. And Lorraine, what coverage Do we have planned for next week?
Loraine Lawson
Well, we have a podcast coming up that will feature David Foster jack Henry. He’ll be talking about what he’s seen it automation and we also have a feature going up on low key no low code, no code solutions with a look at what Wells Fargo is offering to some of their business partners in that space. Great.
JJ Hornblass
So we want to hear from you so please rate the buzz on your podcast platform of choice and of course visit Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn follow bank automation news on Twitter and LinkedIn. Thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to seeing you on bank automation news.com and on this podcast again. See you next time.
This week, Bank Automation News explored the state of automation in mortgage lending and the three stages of intelligent automation, which combines robot process automation (RPA) with artificial intelligence (AI).
In related news, mortgage solution provider Blend, which automates aspects of the mortgage process, acquired title insurance and settlement company Title365, for $500 million. Meanwhile, RPA vendor Automation Anywhere partnered with Google to build out AI-infused RPA products together.
The BAN team also discussed whether more complex technologies could prove a cost deterrent to banks seeking to automate, and debated the role of the cloud in making advanced automations more cost-efficient.
Find this and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap, featuring CEO JJ Hornblass and Associate Editors Jaspreet Kalra and Loraine Lawson.
Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.
Subscribe to The Buzz Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or download the episode.
The following is a transcript generated by AI technology that has been lightly edited but still contains errors.
JJ Hornblass
Hi everyone, I’m JJ Hornblass and welcome to The Buzz from Bank Automation News, where we chart the future of banking automation technology. This is our Weekly Wrap for what’s happening in the banking automation industry for March 19, 2021. Before beginning I want to thank bank automation is advertisers MX and then Vena Solutions for their support. So thank you to them. And I’m pleased to be joined by Loraine Lawson and Jaspreet Kalra from the Bank Automation News editorial team. Hello to both of you. In general economic news: Today the US economic recovery is picking up steam as Americans increase their spending particularly on in person services that have been hurt so badly by Coronavirus, the coronavirus pandemic, The Wall Street Journal reported restaurant and hotel bookings are up. airplane tickets are selling fast consumers spend more on gyms, salons and spas in recent weeks than they have since the pandemic started. Also, jobless claims are hovering near the pandemic’s lowest levels. That’s at 6.2%. Now, and that’s further evidence of recent economic improvement, both very good signs for all of us and the final good sign for the economy. FedEx said yesterday, it’s that its quarterly earnings. That’s the quarter that ended February 28. their earnings nearly tripled and revenue jumped 23%. As the pandemics spurred e commerce in banking, automation, industry news, Intelligent Automation in mortgage finance has clearly come and advancement is coming in that space in many different ways. We reported on it starting yesterday and will continue to be reporting on developments in mortgage finance automation. Loraine, please start by sharing with us kind of the general background or the general developments that you’ve found in mortgage finance automation.Loraine Lawson
Yes, so in some ways mortgage finance automation is a little bit behind the times but changes coming according to Forrester’s Craig Le Claire, he, he ends panel of experts that were on housing wires, recent webinars said that we weren’t quite there, but we will soon be disrupted by what they call Intelligent Automation. That’s the combination of AI with our AI with robots. So marrying that will get us further down the technological roadmap right now, they identified three stages. Stage One is really rooted in task automation. So very basic, we’ve seen that with bots and the bank’s automating processes that that humans typically did. But, you know, we are now entering stage two, which is enhanced digitalization, and that includes things like invoicing and email management and document handling handling. It uses technologies such as optical character recognition, natural language, understanding where she rules and she learning and rules, more more advanced rules. So that would put us come looking ahead to stage three, which would have exceptional exception handling and decision management. So that’s getting closer to where you could do under some underwriting automation there.JJ Hornblass
Sp What have you found in your reporting recently as it relates to mortgage automation?Jaspreet Kalra
Okay, so from what I’ve been able to find so far about mortgage automation is that right now, a lot of companies are looking towards processes that can be easily quantified and translated over to a computer as compared to say embarking on large scale projects that involve more complicated subjects like AI or using a computer to make decisions. Right now it’s about say, keeping people off the phones or keeping people off chat. So that say a customer has a straightforward question about an interest rate, why not let a computer on so that it instead of having a human involved, on the other end, you also have underwriting process software’s evolving in a way so that they can more, more effectively crunch data and make the have the human make decisions instead of having the human crunch data themselves and then make a decision on it. So it’s more of an efficiency proposition right now as compared to an overall you know, undoing of the process proposition.JJ Hornblass
I think that the decisioning the data usage, has significant implications. And so I can, I can see that kind of momentum, continuing the momentum that I wonder about, and I don’t know what you both think about this, but is is related to this, sort of stage two, stage three, that is not necessarily data and decisioning oriented, like you were mentioning Jaspreet, because the in the efficiency gains that they can receive, just by the call it stage one, you know, blocking and tackling automation is so significant. And things generally tend to kind of develop so slowly, in financial services. I mean, this might be a, you know, they’re, they might be working in this area for a really long time. And, and the the notion of kind of getting to this kind of enterprise wide Intelligent Automation, maybe they just want to have the, you know, the the drive or financial incentive to really go beyond that, is there, is there a sense that there is momentum to kind of get beyond this efficiency stage? Or is it, there’s plenty to do, and itJaspreet Kalra
would depend on the return on investment expectations. Now, this is a story that I covered earlier in the week, which talked about how you about Microsoft are leading the sort of, you know, RPA charge along with a lot of other vendors. But at the same time, what companies are now realizing is that large scale products fail large scale enterprises, when they move to Gods, they also need a team to manage the ball. So somebody is going to go there as well. So that’s why it has sort of tampin dry expectations that companies usually have with RPA. So I think that’s going to be a very important factor to watch considering what’s the cost benefit analysis, the companies do themselves, how beneficial is it versus what sort of efficiency we can get out? So I mean, cost is going to be a critical factor.JJ Hornblass
Yeah. And in the other eye, that’s a great point. And the other thing, the other thing about it is, is that outsourcing this development to third parties in banking has historically has historically had very, very strong third party technology companies that have kind of dictated the the Technology Roadmap for a large population of financial solutions, you know, kind of losing that control to means that you’re also losing control of the cost basis for these technologies. And I wonder also whether, you know, to what degree will, uh, you know, a UI path or whatever be able to, you know, assume so much leverage on the, on the financial institution, that the incentive to get beyond the basic automation, at least, let’s say in mortgage where there’s just so much paper and documentation that’s required? Do they have that kind of motivation?Loraine Lawson
You know, I think it’s gonna, I think it’s gonna be on the vendors to make it affordable and appealing. And I do think the vendors are working on that, with cloud offerings, and, you know, doing things at scale, recently, Lind announced it was acquiring title 365. And blend is sort of active in the automation. It’s a technology platform used to automate mortgage, some aspects of mortgage and title 365. their expertise is in title escrow and settlement. So they’re going to be looking to bring that onto their platform. So that’s, you know, a way in which we’ll see and they’re very cloud based. So we’ll see, I think banks looking to the cloud to to achieve a scale of efficiencies.JJ Hornblass
Yes, we do want to add something.
Hi everyone, I’m JJ Hornblass and welcome to The Buzz from Bank Automation News, where we chart the future of banking automation technology. This is our Weekly Wrap for what’s happening in the banking automation industry for March 19, 2021. Before beginning I want to thank bank automation is advertisers MX and then Vena Solutions for their support. So thank you to them. And I’m pleased to be joined by Loraine Lawson and Jaspreet Kalra from the Bank Automation News editorial team. Hello to both of you. In general economic news: Today the US economic recovery is picking up steam as Americans increase their spending particularly on in person services that have been hurt so badly by Coronavirus, the coronavirus pandemic, The Wall Street Journal reported restaurant and hotel bookings are up. airplane tickets are selling fast consumers spend more on gyms, salons and spas in recent weeks than they have since the pandemic started. Also, jobless claims are hovering near the pandemic’s lowest levels. That’s at 6.2%. Now, and that’s further evidence of recent economic improvement, both very good signs for all of us and the final good sign for the economy. FedEx said yesterday, it’s that its quarterly earnings. That’s the quarter that ended February 28. their earnings nearly tripled and revenue jumped 23%. As the pandemics spurred e commerce in banking, automation, industry news, Intelligent Automation in mortgage finance has clearly come and advancement is coming in that space in many different ways. We reported on it starting yesterday and will continue to be reporting on developments in mortgage finance automation. Loraine, please start by sharing with us kind of the general background or the general developments that you’ve found in mortgage finance automation.Loraine Lawson
Yes, so in some ways mortgage finance automation is a little bit behind the times but changes coming according to Forrester’s Craig Le Claire, he, he ends panel of experts that were on housing wires, recent webinars said that we weren’t quite there, but we will soon be disrupted by what they call Intelligent Automation. That’s the combination of AI with our AI with robots. So marrying that will get us further down the technological roadmap right now, they identified three stages. Stage One is really rooted in task automation. So very basic, we’ve seen that with bots and the bank’s automating processes that that humans typically did. But, you know, we are now entering stage two, which is enhanced digitalization, and that includes things like invoicing and email management and document handling handling. It uses technologies such as optical character recognition, natural language, understanding where she rules and she learning and rules, more more advanced rules. So that would put us come looking ahead to stage three, which would have exceptional exception handling and decision management. So that’s getting closer to where you could do under some underwriting automation there.JJ Hornblass
Sp What have you found in your reporting recently as it relates to mortgage automation?Jaspreet Kalra
Okay, so from what I’ve been able to find so far about mortgage automation is that right now, a lot of companies are looking towards processes that can be easily quantified and translated over to a computer as compared to say embarking on large scale projects that involve more complicated subjects like AI or using a computer to make decisions. Right now it’s about say, keeping people off the phones or keeping people off chat. So that say a customer has a straightforward question about an interest rate, why not let a computer on so that it instead of having a human involved, on the other end, you also have underwriting process software’s evolving in a way so that they can more, more effectively crunch data and make the have the human make decisions instead of having the human crunch data themselves and then make a decision on it. So it’s more of an efficiency proposition right now as compared to an overall you know, undoing of the process proposition.JJ Hornblass
I think that the decisioning the data usage, has significant implications. And so I can, I can see that kind of momentum, continuing the momentum that I wonder about, and I don’t know what you both think about this, but is is related to this, sort of stage two, stage three, that is not necessarily data and decisioning oriented, like you were mentioning Jaspreet, because the in the efficiency gains that they can receive, just by the call it stage one, you know, blocking and tackling automation is so significant. And things generally tend to kind of develop so slowly, in financial services. I mean, this might be a, you know, they’re, they might be working in this area for a really long time. And, and the the notion of kind of getting to this kind of enterprise wide Intelligent Automation, maybe they just want to have the, you know, the the drive or financial incentive to really go beyond that, is there, is there a sense that there is momentum to kind of get beyond this efficiency stage? Or is it, there’s plenty to do, and itJaspreet Kalra
would depend on the return on investment expectations. Now, this is a story that I covered earlier in the week, which talked about how you about Microsoft are leading the sort of, you know, RPA charge along with a lot of other vendors. But at the same time, what companies are now realizing is that large scale products fail large scale enterprises, when they move to Gods, they also need a team to manage the ball. So somebody is going to go there as well. So that’s why it has sort of tampin dry expectations that companies usually have with RPA. So I think that’s going to be a very important factor to watch considering what’s the cost benefit analysis, the companies do themselves, how beneficial is it versus what sort of efficiency we can get out? So I mean, cost is going to be a critical factor.JJ Hornblass
Yeah. And in the other eye, that’s a great point. And the other thing, the other thing about it is, is that outsourcing this development to third parties in banking has historically has historically had very, very strong third party technology companies that have kind of dictated the the Technology Roadmap for a large population of financial solutions, you know, kind of losing that control to means that you’re also losing control of the cost basis for these technologies. And I wonder also whether, you know, to what degree will, uh, you know, a UI path or whatever be able to, you know, assume so much leverage on the, on the financial institution, that the incentive to get beyond the basic automation, at least, let’s say in mortgage where there’s just so much paper and documentation that’s required? Do they have that kind of motivation?Loraine Lawson
You know, I think it’s gonna, I think it’s gonna be on the vendors to make it affordable and appealing. And I do think the vendors are working on that, with cloud offerings, and, you know, doing things at scale, recently, Lind announced it was acquiring title 365. And blend is sort of active in the automation. It’s a technology platform used to automate mortgage, some aspects of mortgage and title 365. their expertise is in title escrow and settlement. So they’re going to be looking to bring that onto their platform. So that’s, you know, a way in which we’ll see and they’re very cloud based. So we’ll see, I think banks looking to the cloud to to achieve a scale of efficiencies.JJ Hornblass
Yes, we do want to add something.
Jaspreet Kalra
Yeah, I mean, the cloud point is going to be the space to watch because you seeing leading cloud providers redoubled on their investment plans, like Google yesterday announced that they will be putting down $7 billion in offices and data management centers in the United States, which basically means you’re going to see a lot of activity happening around clouds. And earlier this week, Automation Anywhere, you get, again, a big IP vendor just announced that Google Cloud is partnering the two of them apart, during and they will be building out RPA products together, building out AI infused RPA products together and also that Google Cloud will serve as automation anyways, primary cloud vendor. So I think the space for cloud market shares is going to be an interesting space to watch as we move towards more automation or say more even more AI infused technologies.
JJ Hornblass
I mean, I look I understand what both of you’re saying right that the cloud Economics kind of generally are a counterbalance to to escalating costs, but you can’t assume that that’s going to be the case, you can assume that it will continue to be the case that it may very well be that a kind of corner gets turned and the wet, especially when you get to Intelligent Automation. And and you’re really, you know, seeing, as you described it, Loraine, you know, like really going to enterprise decision and coming out of an automated that, I mean, it who, if you’re the vendor who is controlling the enterprise, or you know, decisioning, for a financial institution, I think you’ve got a lot of leverage for institution. And, and I wonder, you know, whether that even even with cloud kind of pushing down the cost basis, whether that necessarily means that costs will continue to slow down, or, or whether they’ll go up?
Loraine Lawson
Well, and those subscriptions, once you get onto them, they don’t usually stay static. So some companies have actually started to hire people to manage the cost of their services, their cloud services, because they, you know, it’s just like Netflix, it goes up by a few dollars every, every couple of months, it seems like so those costs don’t stay static. So that’s something else that will be interesting to watch is as these vendors gain more control of the IT systems. At what point did they become indispensable and like a utility and sort of be able to raise costs when they want?
JJ Hornblass
Right? Yeah, I think I think the I think it’s the Open, open automation dynamic that is going to be crucial because the more financial, the more flexibility a financial institution has to bring in other vendors, the less leverage those those major automation vendors have. And and that’ll be a counterbalance to make sure that the industry kind of continues on a positive innovation trajectory when it comes to banking automation, but time will tell. So we’re we’re not going to solve that today. It is in the meantime, we have our bank automation ignite conference coming up on April 13 214. I actually did a prep call yesterday with Justin Han seikar of keybank. He is in charge of all of wellness and originations experience, and a key is going to be talking about automation in customer experience should be an excellent presentation and just one of many so hope you will join us. Visit bank automation ignite calm for details. And Lorraine, what coverage Do we have planned for next week?
Loraine Lawson
Well, we have a podcast coming up that will feature David Foster jack Henry. He’ll be talking about what he’s seen it automation and we also have a feature going up on low key no low code, no code solutions with a look at what Wells Fargo is offering to some of their business partners in that space. Great.
JJ Hornblass
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