UiPath today filed its S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the initial public offering prospectus is a nearly 200-page document detailing the robotic process automation (RPA) company’s financial and business dealings; some of the biggest banks in the world use the vendor’s products internally, including Bank of America, the Bank of Montreal, and Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC).

UiPath, founded in 2005, has raised $2 billion in eight funding rounds, according to Crunchbase; the number includes its most recent $750 million round, which valued the automation software maker at $35 billion.

While the SEC filing provides financial details, it also gives some insight into how customers are using the bot-based business. The use cases featured here show that bots have been used largely to augment, rather than replace, human workers.

Three RPA use cases

The $2.25 trillion SMBC Group used UiPath’s platform to save $3.5 million hours as of Dec. 31, 2019, according to the filing. The Tokyo-based bank first adopted the platform in 2017 as a tool to reduce the “impact of excessive hours on its workforce.”

By freeing employees from routine tasks, workers can “focus on high-value added tasks and deliver higher productivity and improved operational efficiencies,” the case study in the filing states. The bank’s CEO is quoted as saying that both RPA and AI are core components of it as a digital business, reflecting the intelligent automation trend on which Bank Automation News has recently reported.

In a second case study, credit reporting agency Equifax was looking to handle compliance and business more quickly and turned to RPA to support a digital workforce, deploying more than 400 robots across finance, operations, compliance and technology functions, according to the SEC filing. Equifax, with $1.1 trillion in revenue, “created over 1.1 million hours of capacity using [UiPath’s] platform,” the IPO filing states. The company expanded its use of the platform “by applying attended robots to support call center operations to enhance customer service and responsiveness.”

For Equifax, bots were used to support speed, not cost savings, according to a quote from Equifax’s senior vice president of global shared services. “RPA was never a cost play. It is about speed of doing business and compliance, getting the benefits out of the workforce that we have never achieved before,” he added.

In a third case, a state Department of Labor turned to bots during the peak of the pandemic to handle an “unprecedented increase in unemployment fillings,” according to the S-1 filing. When more than 1.5 million unemployment requests came into the agency, which typically only handles around 300,000 filings per year, the state deployed 200 bots and processed 300,000 unemployment claims in one weekend. Bots were then applied to 90 other tasks, including fraud detection, resulting in a savings of more than $1 billion in fraudulent claims within a few weeks, according to the case study.

The use cases for RPA are varied. In addition to those highlighted in the filing, other major UiPath clients mentioned in the report include many household names, such as Foot Locker, Chevron, CVS Health, GE, Toyota, Koch Industries, Adobe, Red Hat and the United Nation’s International Computer Center.

UiPath is a leading RPA vendor, according to both Forrester’s Wave and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, which both rank vendors along four axes. The company’s leading competitors include Automation Anywhere, WorkFusion, Microsoft’s Power Automate, Kryon and Blue Prism.

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.