Loraine Lawson: Good day and welcome to the Buzz, a Bank Automation News podcast. I’m Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson. Recently, I spoke with Jesse McHargue, senior solutions engineer with the robot process automation company Nintex. I asked Mr. McHargue what types of processes he sees banks automating with bots.

Jesse McHargue
So a lot of the times, it comes down to automating more of the repetitive time consuming tasks, things like that. So such as you kind of like I was just speaking to the creation of new customer accounts, things like that. Another big one there, where we focus in on is when banks go through acquisitions, so merging multiple banks, back end systems into one. So leveraging solutions, like RPA, to kind of comb through that data, normalize it into wherever it’s finally going to be resting. So if it’s coming from multiple sources, how do you get it into one single view to be consumed in you know, a CRM, or into another bank and core systems that were there, it can be used, you know, in the the new bank moving forward. From there, I would also say that we are starting to see more, more automation efforts around self help. So how do existing customers reach out to the bank for a variety of reasons, whether it’s disputes, you know, basic, you know, requests, to, you know, about any sort of like, like loans or funding or things like that, to, you know, even just, you know, opening up new accounts and things like that. So, it’s kind of a wide spread your view into it, but probably the biggest one is really around. I would say, the, the acquisition side is probably what I get pulled into the most.

Loraine Lawson
Okay, are there opportunities or maybe ways you see other types of businesses up automating that you think could translate to financial institutions or opportunities they’re missing when it comes to automating with RPA?

Jesse McHargue
Um, yeah, I would say, I mean, with RPA, I think there’s probably opportunity around, you know, extending it out to other systems that banks are working with and not focusing in on just your legacy core applications, like green screens, you know, you know, as for hundreds and things like that the things that are maybe a bit more antiquated. You know, it’s, it’s the idea around how can you take RPA and others augmented into your things like workflows to help bridge the gap. I think a lot of banking institutions, a lot of financial institutions are still on a lot of legacy applications for a variety of reasons. I think that they work in environments that are maybe a bit more restrictive in terms of what technology can be deployed to it. So an RPA solution being deployed locally, that has access to a variety of other systems is a great feature and a great tool to have in their toolbox because it allows things such as you know, for us something like Nintex workbook cloud to be able to communicate to our Nintex RPA product. So now you have a tool that sits inside of their environment has access to their, their systems that are behind their firewall, but potentially could reach out to bridge the gap where processes live outside of their environment, where they need to interact with more a more modern interface. So I think RPA is not just a tool where we think of the highly repetitive yet the time consuming tasks. It’s also it can help feed those systems that are just not tied into modern interfaces that we see in you know, in a lot of different marketplaces and things like that.

Loraine Lawson
So we’re always looking for best practices for deploying bots for I’m writing history right now in governing, but just automation in general. So best practices can you share?

Jesse McHargue
For RPA? Or just automation? Either one? Sure. Um, well, I’ll, I’ll start with, I guess it’s kind of applicable to both right. So I think first and foremost is your best practices is definitely understanding what you’re building before you start building. There’s a reason why architects drop schematics and blueprints, whether building a building, and not just, you know, picking up a hammer and some boards and start slapping it together. There’s a reason why solution engineers sit down and think about all the different tools that they have available to build out the best solution possible. Because you need to understand not only what systems are in play, but what are the capabilities of the tools that you have at your disposal, such as an RPA product, such as workflow automation, what can they do for you? So I think, you know, first and foremost, planning, right, understanding what you’re building, and why you’re building, I would say also to is the start, you start small, and grow naturally, just, you know, virtue of automating a process, you’re also improving that process, right? Because process improvement is a natural byproduct of Process automation. So the idea is, is, you know, automate what the process is today, right? There’s no reason to try to compound the project or the issue at hand, by trying to improve it and automated all at the same time. If you purely just automate it, you quickly find where the gaps are, you quickly find where the extra steps are, that can be removed. And just by doing those things, you’re improving that process. Now, from there kind of moves into more best practices, just because you’ve automated It doesn’t mean you’re done. There’s that continuous cycle to come back and look at a process and understand how has it evolved? How has it changed? Are there better ways of doing business today that weren’t available when we automated this process? I think, in the kind of the world seeing right now, a lot of what organizations went through with the pandemic understood that. And those that understood that Well, were the ones that were successful because they reevaluated their processes, they doubled down on automation, they went back and they looked at how to improve processes to be successful, rather than just being complacent in the way that they do things. And I think that’s really important to you know, plan to really understand your automation as a whole, but then go back and look at it and say Where else can I improve and continually driving towards that?

Loraine Lawson:
What’s New for you all? What do you are you the announcements you want to make or might be making soon?

Jesse McHargue
I mean, what I can say, I’ll stick to that, I guess. Right. Yeah. I mean, we recently made the announcement around our acquisition with Assuresign. So that’s, that’s been a nice addition into our stack. You know, we’re still in the process of finalizing everything. Right. But that’s really a nice additive step into or a nice additive tool into our toolbox, because a lot of processes, you know, if they do require some sort of sign off, right, they require some sort of legal binding contract. So now, organizations don’t need to go out and handle a bunch of different subscriptions with, you know, a variety of vendors to have an E signature, you know, as a part of their overall process, that I think is an index, we’ll be able to offer that as a part of our subscription, you know, for those that wanted to need it, and now have one single license one single subscription that manages, you know, more of what they’re trying to automate and improve upon. I think that is, is probably one of our bigger ones. You would also too, right, we’re, you know, looking at expanding out our footprint with Nintex workflow cloud, really expanding upon that platform and the functionality. We recently released a PDF Converter inside of our forms tool to allow organizations to take their PDF forms and convert them into ninja crypto cloud forms as a part of the tool, so really cool and exciting things because we want to help expedite, you know, our users and our customers in that journey towards automation. So

Loraine Lawson
You see, it’s could be any business, but do you see a lot of applications with RPA? with artificial intelligence? And what does that look like? Um,

Jesse McHargue
Potentially, um, I don’t see a lot of that. Today, I, I kind of have, I don’t want to say mixed emotions about artificial intelligence, and things like that, I think a lot of organizations, when they think of AI, what they are really thinking of is machine learning, and things like that. Because a lot of the times it falls down to, you know, I want to be able to teach a process something and that’s more of machine learning, repetitive finding those common places and what to do with it based on previous outcomes. I think that’s more where the industry is looking towards, is having a tool that can learn and grow with it, rather than having to continually build out processes. When a new process comes up, the idea would be well, you know, hey, these, these things are changing, you know, build out a bit of a scenario, and you feed that into the machine learning, you know, algorithms, and that it, it picks up and grows from there. Artificial Intelligence is kind of a, I don’t want to say a slippery slope, but I think a lot of people probably have misinformation, when they think of artificial intelligence. So AI, I think machine learning and natural language processing seems to be a better fit, at least right now.

Loraine Lawson
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