A global survey of 1,100 bank executives shows a slim majority of banks are automating processes, and at rates lower than in other industries. Moreover, this automation is broad rather than deep — an approach that could lead to rework down the road.

Fifty-eight percent of banks currently use automation on a wide scale, a rate that’s lower than the 67% across other industries, according to a recent survey on future-readiness within the banking industry by global consulting firm Accenture. There are a number of reasons why banks lag behind other industries, including a shortage of talent, a lack of a clear automation strategy, legacy applications that lack necessary computing power, and data silos across the organization, Accenture told Bank Automation News.

The fact that banks are behind other industries shows their need to become more customer-focused, said Benn Konsynski, a professor of information systems and operations management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.

“Digital-first and super app platforms change the face and experience of a changing client,” Konsynski told BAN. “The back end and the front end require transformation as the client journey is changing.”

While 58% of the banks surveyed are currently deploying automation, fewer than 5% are automating the entire process, said Manish Sharma, Accenture’s group chief executive of operations. Automating bad processes and focusing on automating individual tasks, rather than whole processes, are leading to inconsequential or bad business outcomes, he explained.

“In fact, right now, I’ve got many clients where I’m removing all the automation that they have done in the last few years because it’s an absolute disaster,” Sharma said.

Often banks take a technology-first approach to automation without stopping to consider the people and processes involved, said Pam Perdue, a regulatory and compliance consultant who is the chief compliance officer at Heritage Southeast Bank in Jonesboro, Ga.

Perdue, too, has seen banks rip out automations to start over. Often banks, especially smaller institutions, don’t have the expertise to evaluate whether an automation is necessary, or whether the process and employees are ready for it, she said. Banks fail to consider the maturity of the process or prepare the existing team for the eventual solution, which can lead to buyer’s remorse, she noted.

Perdue added that she has also seen banks only partially deploy automation technology because they lack the skill set to deploy the solution, or because of cultural challenges with employees, who may not understand how the automation adds value to their jobs.

“Before you know it, that snowball effect of ‘This isn’t doing what we thought it was going to do’ becomes a rallying cry inside the institution, and adoption starts to decrease,” Perdue said.

This could be because banks often focus on task automation, rather than process automation, Accenture’s Sharma said. He recommended banks answer the following questions before automating:

• Does it enhance customer and employee experience?
• Does it improve quality and consistency to automate the process?
• Does it decrease the lead time for executing the process?
• Does it improve controls on the organization?
• Does it improve compliance?
• Does it improve people’s lives by removing measurable, repeatable, predictable and transactional work so that employees can perform more valuable work?

“It is not about which automation technology one is using,” Sharma said. “The business outcomes, the business processes, people: These three parts come much ahead of the automation stuff. If you get those three things right, automation is easy.”