Financial services organizations are digitizing and automating more processes to keep up with competition, and intelligent process automation (IPA) — which has been growing in use about 20% across all fields — is now becoming ubiquitous.

Market research firm Everest Group in a recent report ranked IPA technology vendors and looked at the market for IPA solutions. Everest defines IPA as automation in business processes that uses a combination of next-generation automation technologies — such as robotic process automation (RPA) or cognitive or artificial intelligence (AI)-based automation, including intelligent document processing and conversational AI.

Based on the research, Everest predicts growth in the and other industries will expand to around 25% over the next three years.

For just about any organization undergoing digital transformation, the question is how to become faster, more efficient and more resilient, Anil Vijayan, partner at Everest, told Bank Automation News. “Very often, the answer to that is at least in part intelligent process automation,” he said.

Vijayan identified five emerging trends in the IPA space:

1. IPA will get smarter. A greater proportion of cognitive elements is finding its way into IPA, Vijayan told BAN. About 60% of new automation projects involve more advanced cognitive tools such as anomaly detection.

2. IPA will be more scalable. “With intelligent [process] automation, even though pretty much everyone is trying to adopt it, the real question is, can you easily scale up — bring it across the organization?” he said.
3. Citizen development will grow. This has been getting more attention, he said, and “everyone is experimenting with what they can do with citizen development, especially with the talent shortage.”
4. IPA service providers will bring IPA solutions packages to the market. These solutions will need training on particular data sets to make them functional for a particular process but will speed implementation, he noted.
5. IPA service providers will pre-build connectors to legacy and other systems. “Very often these intelligent automation solutions need to talk to various other systems, so having these [connections] pre-built enables faster implementation,” Vijayan said.

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