It’s clear to see why automation is an attractive option for financial services institutions. The never-ending pressures of budget and staff reductions, increased offshoring of certain internal functions, the continued growth in fintech providers delivering niche offerings, and the pandemic ensuring that remote working is here to stay — all these challenges can be offset to certain degrees with automation.

To remain competitive, banks and credit unions need to evolve past the manual, paper-based processes that bottlenecked many of their operations. With Gartner suggesting that 66% of chief financial officers spent more on automation technology in 2021, finance institutions are serious when it comes to streamlining internal workflows, but which processes make the most sense for automation?

Below are four common processes ripe for automation within banks and credit unions today:

1. Account opening

Opening a new account is the classic document-intensive process for many financial services providers. Application documents are completed, scans of relevant forms of identification are shared, and the overall process moves forward only once each step has been completed and approved.

Automation can help massively in the streamlining of this activity.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered document classification and data extraction enable higher volumes of paper files to be digitally processed than ever before. Robotic process automation (RPA) tools intelligently (and near-instantaneously) perform the mundane, expensive and error-prone human tasks of data entry. Workflow automation routes scanned documents and extracted information to the relevant people with full auditability. By intelligently automating the reviews and approvals of all but the most complex applications, the account opening procedure may be low-hanging fruit because of the significant speed and accuracy improvements can provide.

2. Risk management

While the management of financial risk at banks and credit unions is a long-established discipline, operational risk management — the governance of compliance, financial crime, cyber-risk and IT risk — is growing in importance. With every recent privacy breach and the associated industry or government regulation comes additional complexity and potential risk.

Anti-money laundering (AML) compliance alone costs U.S. financial firms an estimated $25.3 billion per year — and the costs of governing newer privacy-related concerns such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are yet to be fully felt.

Banks and credit unions can reduce their risk exposure by automating aspects of their operations that are most vulnerable to non-compliance, security breaches, etc. A core risk management and mitigation challenge is the ability, or inability, to process the vast volumes of documents and data that contain sensitive or confidential information. Automation solutions provide a range of services such as AI-enabled content classification, personally identifiable information (PII) detection, and intelligent integration with external credit and risk systems to collate the most comprehensive view of risk factors available to the bank or credit union.

Armed with this data, financial services institutions are better equipped to identify fraudulent activity, spot potential bad debts, lock down PII and other sensitive data, and take a more pro-active approach to risk management.

3. Subject access requests

Privacy regulations such as CCPA and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enhance data access and visibility rights of financial services clients. These mandates also add another layer of compliance that banks and credit unions must contend with.

The subject access request (SAR) within the GDPR directive, for example, requires providers to deliver a report containing all data relating to a client — the “subject” — within one month of the request, or face potential fines. For banks and credit unions that still use multiple disconnected legacy systems to manage different account types, pulling this level of information together for clients is a daunting and time-consuming task.

However, many automation solutions have federation capabilities that provide access to multiple information and data sources. With a centralized approach to searching for and accessing data across business systems and repositories, performing comprehensive subject access requests becomes much easier.

4. Client engagement

Let’s be clear: client management should never be automated. Bank and credit union customers want — and deserve — a human touch for many interactions, but automation still plays an important role in improving the client experience.

In many cases, the communication between a financial services institution and its client is driven by the client — i.e., to inquire about a new service, to make a complaint, to ask a question, etc. — and this customer service function is another area of low-hanging fruit of intelligent automation.

Robotic desktop automation (RDA) tools provide a customer service representative with a context-based search utility for that specific client’s content as they’re on the phone, as they enter a question using a chatbot, as they submit a form on the website, etc. All of this greatly enhances the customer experience.

Automation can also enable an increased level of interaction, accuracy and engagement — reminding and alerting staff of the best times to be in touch with clients. Advanced solutions can even suggest topics of conversation such as birthdays, upcoming anniversaries, educational events and new offerings that the client might be interested in.

Time to act is now

Automation may seem like a topic that has been around for a long time and one that never truly comes to fruition, but the technology has come a long way in recent years. Advances in areas such as AI and RPA provide the intelligence to perform advanced document classification and data extraction, the cloud offers the power to process vast quantities of data at low cost, and we now have a workforce that requires digital information to function.

Automation is no longer a dream of the future. The technology, best practices and experienced vendors are ready today without heavy licensing, risk or big project costs. The only question that remains is whether banks and credit unions can afford to ignore automation any longer.

Ron Cameron is president and co-founder of KnowledgeLake, a cloud-native solution for document processing that enables organizations to capture, process, and manage their content in a single platform. Founded in 1999, the company combines intelligent document capture and robotic process automation (RPA) to increase productivity.