Automation has provided the financial services industry an efficient, fast and scalable way to operate — but comes with its own challenges. During the Banking Automation Summit last week, Bank Innovation editors asked industry leaders what about automation keeps them up at night. Here is what they said:

Citibank

“One of the biggest dilemmas is, how do I allocate my investment? Because there are so many different things and everybody kind of points to a shiny technology with a great outcome … But how do I make the right bets?” said Tapodyuti Bose, global head of digital channels and data for Citi’s treasury and trade solutions.

The $2 trillion bank is shifting investments away from robotic process automation (RPA) as bespoke documentation in treasury and trade bogs down the return on investment, Bose said. RPA has often cost the bank more than it has saved, he said, and the bank is taking steps to eliminate manual processes rather than automate them.

Wells Fargo

“How do we prioritize and deliver fast enough to keep the energy we have across our team member base, to keep moving forward because people are excited about what we’re doing,” said Allysun Fleming, treasury management head of client experience at Wells Fargo.

The $1.92 trillion bank is experimenting with workstation automation — low-code and drag-and-drop solutions — to allow treasury employees to automate their own tasks. Within treasury, Wells Fargo is taking a micro-process automation approach to achieving automation at scale.

The bank also married up data management and automation teams to get smarter about which processes to automate. Because Wells’ treasury business offers many products with different configuration choices, automating every combination and permutation would be an endless task, she said. Rather, it is using data it already has about clients to predict their needs and fulfill the automation requests.

PNC Bank

“Resources,” said Ken Stoneman, intelligent automation director for the corporate and institutional banking arm of the $461.8 billion PNC. “Where am I going to get the resources to keep up with the demand we’re getting in order to automate things?”

To better meet that internal demand, Stoneman’s team pulls in technology partners to determine if their systems are API-enabled. If not, the automation team will try to initiate a pipeline with the applications to build APIs prior to RPA development. With regard to automation development in the next year, Stoneman’s team is focused on four core business areas: commercial lending operations, treasury management, business credit groups and real estate.

TD Bank

“This accelerated pace of technology — I think it’s one of the biggest opportunities but it’s also one of the challenges that we face at this time,” said Manavpreet Thiara, who oversees digital, automation and process simplification at TD Bank. “We have to do it in a manner that we not only provide secure and stable platforms, but we truly have to do this while we bring all the employees, which is both business and technology, together.”

Co-locating business and tech teams, and enhancing internal employee skills to understand and leverage customer data are central to data strategy at the $356 billion bank. The only way to harness the power of data in this quick-paced environment, Thiara said, is to have employees across business and technology garner the acumen of both business and tech.

Citizens Bank

“How do we transition humans for the skill sets of the future?” said Joanne Wyper, executive vice president and head of operations for Citizens’ commercial bank. “If everything’s going to be automated over the next decade, then it keeps me up at night about how I take as many of my colleagues with me on that journey into the critical skills, critical-thinking skills, human social interaction.”

Similar to Wells Fargo, the $179 billion Citizens has created “agile pods” to achieve unification across the value chain, Wyper said. These are pared-down, leaner groups within Citizens’ agile teams that align subject matter experts with dedicated robotic process specialists and process engineers. The pods allow multidisciplinary and multiskilled employees to work together and learn from one another.

Regions Bank

“It’s actually not the technology, it’s the people … demotivating the talent or not engaging them enough and not making them feel good about what they do,” said Amala Duggirala, enterprise chief operations and technology officer at Regions. “Especially in this pandemic, where we are all working remote, we are losing that emotional connection with the employee base, not understanding their sentiment.”

The $145 billion bank has ramped up automation efforts in its call center to stifle attrition. Regions’ goal in doing so was to help its agents better prepare rather than to tackle automation problems, Duggirala said. The Birmingham, Ala.-based bank launched a live chat feature, enhanced its virtual teller machines by automating certain flows, and launched AI-backed smart routing and problem resolution bots to route calls to appropriate agents and provide AI-oriented responses to those agents.

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