Automating anti-money laundering proved a cost-effective and an efficient starting point for the robotic process automation (RPA) efforts for Scotiabank and the National Bank of Pakistan.

Both banks spoke about why they started with AML investigations during a webinar presented by RPA vendor WorkFusion earlier this week.

Andrew Szebo, vice president of the $926 billion Scotiabank, said when the robotics team first started, it was unfocused and took four months to build an automation at a high cost. It wasn’t until the team’s focus shifted to business values such as freeing up people’s time that the team targeted labor-intensive AML for automation. The Toronto-based bank now uses bots to automate entity searches, reducing that process to seconds rather than hours.

“One of the reasons we started there is because the way we were solving problems in AML is throwing people at the problem,” Szebo said. “If you had a giant volume of entity searches, for example, we’d just hire 500 people in two, three weeks to do that work, and that wasn’t really sustainable.”

Even with all that manpower, the cases were piling up, which meant the bank was running out of options, Szebo said.

Automating AML also showed that automation could pay off in terms of cost reduction. During the first year of implementing RPA, Scotiabank earned$1.50 back for every $1 invested; now, that number ranges from $5-10 returned on every $1 invested, Szebo said.

Forrester also reported last year that RPA can cut costs when it comes to managing manual tasks. “RPA solutions can also speed up the data integration process and provide data connectivity to hitherto hard-to-get-to data sources,” the report read.

In addition to requiring lots of manpower, AML work is also tedious for employees, said Jim Stubbs, CEO of the $18.82 billion National Bank of Pakistan, Americas.

“Frankly, in addition to the costs associated with that, a lot of the work is not very satisfying,” Stubbs said. “A lot of the work is redundant, it’s exacting, it’s repetitious. We felt like it lends itself well to automation.”

Szebo agreed, adding that the benefits to employees are an often-overlooked part of the automation conversation.

Stubbs said automating AML also became an opportunity for redesigning the process from the ground up. Automating AML offers also reduces data errors and regulatory risk because it’s easier to monitor and test one automated process than 500 individuals manually entering data, Stubbs said.

“I look at automation as an opportunity to take a step back to redesign the process to decide what works,” Stubbs said.

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.