Attendees at the recent Bank Automation Summit were presented with new ideas, strategies and practical applications for automation. Bank Automation News editors selected five of the best use cases and strategies from the Summit: strategies to help financial institutions on their automation journeys.

1. Establish a lab for automation innovations

The $5.7 billion MSU Federal Credit Union utilizes an onsite lab to pilot innovations and automations, whether it’s bringing in fintech partners or building out custom creations, said Ami Iceman-Haueter, vice president of research and digital experience at the East Lansing, Mich.-based credit union.

The automation pilot phase begins by determining the business need, establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) and exploring how to scale into full production, she said.

The credit union also works with fintechs to ensure that metrics and scalability are both defined before starting new projects.

“We actually go through a process that we call ‘greenlighting’ with a lot of our fintech partners to say ‘This has added value in the KPIs that we’ve defined during the pilot phase, and we expect X scalability from them,’” Iceman-Haueter said. “And we set that measure as we greenlight them and move them into full-scale production.”

The bank also explores how automation might improve employees’ workflow or how to bring a new experience to the membership base, she added.

The lab functions as a space for employees to innovate and identify which automation projects should be rolled out at full scale, and determine how to measure success going forward, Iceman-Haueter said.

“We report out on those quarterly for about three years after until they become stabilized,” she noted.

2. Double fraud investigations with RPA

At Cleveland-based KeyBank, the fraud team arrives between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. to begin reviewing cases for the day, followed by an hour or two to build a case and then more time to review it, said Dominic Cugini, the bank’s chief information officer of service digitization.

“By lunch, if you’re good, you have one case done, maybe another one started,” Cugini told BAS audiences.

The $186 billion bank streamlined its fraud department by deploying robotic process automation (RPA) bots that search multiple systems to build cases, he said. This allowed Key to double its capacity for fraud investigation without adding a single person, Cugini said.

“Now we build those cases 24/7; it’s nonstop,” he said. “When people come in between six and eight, the first thing they do is go to the queue pull a case and start working a case.”

3. Automate client pitchbooks using AI

To better support its traders and investment bankers, the Bank of Montreal automated its client pitchbooks, said Victor Tung, U.S. chief technology and operations officer and chief information and operations officer at BMO Capital Markets.

Generally, pitchbooks follow a standard formula that involves extracting data, adding valuations and putting it into a template, Tung said. The $805.9 billion bank applied artificial intelligence with other automations to save employees time for more strategic tasks, he added.

The automation led to both a better product and experience, Tung said.

“It’s not really just driven by cost savings. It’s actually true by better experience, better Net Promoter Score and better deals that we can actually tackle,” he said. “We win more deals when you actually apply proper context to what the client needs.”

4. Deconstruct ‘failed customer experience’ metrics

Measuring failed customer experiences can lead to better overall interactions, said John Elton, chief information officer at the $40 billion TIAA Bank.

The bank uses tools, including Acoustic’s Tealeaf, that monitor online sessions and measure where the experiences fail. Elton gave the example of a 5% to 6% failure rate in the transactions space.

“I want to spend a lot of time digesting that, looking at it, breaking it down, trying to understand why is there that failed customer experience,” he said. “Is it something that is technology driven? Is it education driven? What’s the purpose behind that?”

Once the team understands more about why the failure is occurring, it looks at what technology can be applied to that problem to improve it even a half percent, Elton said.

5. Prepare for real-time payments

Now is the time for banks to build an automation foundation to support real-time payments (RTP), as the Federal Reserve’s RTP payments rail FedNow Service is set to deploy in early 2023, panelists said during the discussion “Strategies for Automating Payment Processes.”

“In order to solve clients today, you need a basic set of capabilities around invoice automation, receivables, automation, and that’s to help them for the journey today,” said Radha Suvarna, head of enterprise payments strategy and innovation at Citizens. “That’s step one, and Citizens has implemented receivables automation capabilities, invoice automation capabilities for our clients.”

Now, clients are looking to adopt developments around RTP, embedded payments and application programming interface (API) capabilities, Suvarna said. “We need to help clients in their journey.”