JPMorgan is committed to facilitating $2.5 trillion for sustainable green projects or companies investing significantly in green projects — and most global banks have a similar commitment.

Rama Variankaval, global head of the Center for Carbon Transition at JPMorgan, revealed the trend during the recent Bank for International Settlement (BIS) Innovation Summit.

“I think every financial institution is aligned that the industry as a whole has to do its part,” Variankaval said during a panel on sustainability.

But what can banks do to make themselves — and their technology — more sustainable? Experts told Bank Automation News the solution: Automate.

Automation key to green initiatives

Automation is a key technology that can help banks go green beyond their investment strategies and into their IT strategies, according to Forrester analyst Abhijit Sunil, who researches green and sustainable IT programs.

“With regards to green IT, it’s all about — essentially — optimization,” Sunil told BAN. “I often talk about how green IT is about being responsible for the planet but the way to achieve that is by optimizing it as much as possible so that it consumes the least amount of resources, and at the same time generates the least amount of waste.”

Sunil co-wrote the recent Forrester report, “Jekyll And Hyde: The Dual Role of Emerging Tech in Environmental Sustainability,” which looked at the environmental impact of technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), edge computing and automation.

“The pandemic has pushed many organizations to prioritize automation investments; sustainability is an under-the-radar net-positive of these investments,” the report notes.

Specifically, intelligent automation such as digital process automation (DPA), robotic process automation (RPA) and conversational intelligence like chatbots support working from home, and this cuts down on commute times and dependence on paper. This, in turn, reduces the carbon footprint of production, transportation and disposal.

“Automation downsides are few, so maximize automation to accelerate energy transition,” the Forrester report notes.

It is a use case that Bank of America noted when BAN first began exploring the intersection of sustainability and automation.

“Automation is a component of a broader environmental strategy at Bank of America,” a spokesperson told BAN.

The bank has used automation and digitalization to shift manual, paper-heavy processes to digital processes. Peer-to-peer payments via Zelle have also allowed consumers to make transactions without paper checks, the spokesperson noted.

UiPath reduces cloud footprint

RPA vendor UiPath has highlighted how banks have used bots to address going green, noting in one blog post that:

• Process management company Firstsource used UiPath automation to digitize loan documents and manage customer processes;
• Turkey-based commercial bank Isbank automated the process of requests to postpone loan repayments for customers impacted by COVID-19; and
• City National Bank reduced new client onboarding time to less than one minute from 10 minutes.

The New York-based vendor also leverages automation internally to improve sustainability, said Margareta Mucibabici, who oversees UiPath’s Automation for Good program.

The company has reduced its footprint in the cloud by using Microsoft Azure for 90% of its processing and applications, according to its environmental, sustainability and governance report.

Automation can help optimize when and how those processes run on virtual machines, said Nitin Purwar, senior director for the Banking and Financial Services division at UiPath.

“One of the best use cases for us — and not just for us, even for our customers — has been, how do you manage your virtual machines,” Purwar said. “There are instances where [a] particular unit is supposed to work only from this time to this time. You use automation to switch off those virtual machines after that unit doesn’t work.”

Automation can also be used to stagger the execution of processes that don’t need to run in parallel to minimize cloud usage, he added. Those automations can be handled by an orchestration manager that comes with the platform, he explained.

“If there are 100 bots, and we need to determine what processes need to run on what bots right, our orchestrator looks at what is the available capacity, and then it determines how to assign the processes to those bots. That assignment happens in a way that you are optimally using the robots,” Purwar said. “The same principle applies even for infrastructure; the only additional work we are doing is we are going to the business and asking, ‘Is there a specific time when you definitely want your process to be running?’”

UiPath was able to reduce its use of virtual machines on Microsoft Azure by 60% to 65%, Mucibabici said. The company is able to track its emissions by using a sustainability calculator offered by Microsoft.

“We are committed to utilizing Azure as efficiently as possible,” she said. “Moving forward, we intend to leverage this [sustainability] tool to analyze and disclose our cloud-based GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions in future reporting on our cloud computing.”

3 buckets of action for going green in IT

There are three actionable buckets to consider when going green in IT, Sunil said:

1. Procure green-energy resources: Many organizations are looking to purchase green energy and using the cloud is a way that organizations can shift to green power for data centers, since green energy tends to be more available and accessible to large cloud providers on the West Coast than in smaller organizations in other regions, Sunil said.
2. Evaluate internal operations: This can include data center optimization, automation technologies and exploring emerging technologies to help with greening the IT stack.
3. Employ waste reduction techniques: This can be as simple as reducing paper waste, but it can also extend to the lifecycle management of IT resources and manage e-waste responsibly, he said.

“You need to have efficient measurement practices that will penetrate each of these areas that you play in and find what are some gaps you may have or opportunities,” Sunil said.

Then the question becomes how IT reports those results back into various sustainability frameworks, he said.

“There again, automation helps with reducing the number of man hours needs to do that, and collecting data, packaging it in the way that needs to be reported back,” Sunil said.

Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022, taking place Sept. 19-20 in Seattle, is a crucial event on automation and automation technology in banking. Learn more and register for Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022.