Automation will take up a larger share of tech budgets next year as banks prioritize system and process modernization.

The $1.5 billion Provident Bank is increasing its overall tech budget by 22% next year, according to Chief Information Officer John Kamin, who spoke at the Banking Automation Summit this week along with representatives from several financial institutions.

That increase is driven by Provident’s acquisition of the SB One Bank, with $12 billion of assets, which closed July 31. As the Jersey City, N.J.-based bank works through its system conversion and onboards acquired bank employees to its systems, it has developed a robotic process automation bot to grant new team members access rights across the bank’s internal systems, many of which are guarded with specific user credentials. The bot can automate the processing of about 80% of the bank’s new employees and is meant to be “a Band-Aid” until the bank can stand up a more robust identity management tool.

Longer term, Provident will prioritize a revamp of its commercial lending operations next year by eliminating “wait states,” Kamin said, and implementing one-step processes that leverage automation in decisioning, money movement and customer ID verification. “We found some weak areas as a result of this [pandemic],” he said, adding the operating deficiencies revealed by the pandemic are “determining our budget for next year.”

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Discover Personal Loans will also favor automation in its tech budget, which is likely to remain fairly flat on a year-over-year basis, according to VP of Marketing Matthew Lattman. “As we look at automation work, continuing work on integrations with other partners, and now as we’ve gotten through a lot of our core modernization work, I think the proportion of automation work will grow,” he said.

Discover will sunset older, more expensive technologies in favor of newer ones, especially in the realm of data warehousing, analytics and moving analysts to more cloud-based technologies.

Stuart, Fla.-based Seacoast Bank’s tech budget will also be close to flat year over year, but the amount distributed to automation is significant, said Jeff Bray, executive vice president of technology and operations. The $8.1 billion dollar bank relies on partnerships with fintechs to drive digitization, and much of the year-over-year shift in budget will go to finding partnerships. Seacoast’s technology partners include nCino, which provides cloud-based banking products, and Okta, which provides multifactor authentication.

Birmingham, Ala.-based Regions is also increasing its focus and budget, said Amala Duggirala, enterprise chief operations and technology officer at the $145 billion bank. Regions is embarking on a consumer lending and deposit system replacement to be speed customer wait-times, so automation technology and streamlined processes will be key, she said.