An increased demand for digitization and automation of legacy processes is leading banks to utilize more robotic process automation (RPA) solutions, with customers seeking scalable bots that go beyond mundane desktop-based work.

Fourteen RPA software providers, including major players like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Microsoft and WorkFusion, were analyzed in “The Forrester Wave: Robotic Process Automation Q1 2021,” a report released Monday by Forrester. The providers were evaluated based on metrics like bot design and development, product vision, enterprise customers and product revenue.

Although demand for RPAs has ticked up, “ROI [return on investment] expectations and achievement have been dampened somewhat,” Craig Le Clair, principal analyst at Forrester, told Bank Automation News. He said initial expectations saw a bot extracting 1.5 to three full-time employees for a back-office finance and accounting use case; after startup costs, a bot would require $10,000 to $15,000 per year for recurring costs.

But ROI expectations have been reduced to an extent by the costs associated with setting up automation centers of excellence (COE), or similar intra-organizational teams, necessary to govern and scale bot operations.

“Firms embarked on strong ROI projects that did not include the soft costs for COEs or governance. As the industry matured and they realized this, they started to allocate some of the COE costs to individual projects, which dampened ROI,” said Le Clair.

When evaluated on current product offerings, business strategy, and market share in the sector, automation software firm UiPath stands apart by continuing to expand its worldwide market share and product lineup, according to the Forrester report.

But while UiPath has held on to its pole position, Microsoft has made steady gains in catching up to the industry leaders. The software giant has continued to expand its footprint and, by making its RPA platform simpler to use, has ensured that, “customers seeking RPA get an easy, attractive offering that fits business users, citizen developers and professional developers alike,” the report notes.

While simpler platforms are attractive, document processing, bot governance through auditability and transparency, and bank-grade security for sensitive information are all key for financial institutions looking for RPA solutions.

WorkFusion, the intelligent automation firm focused on banks and insurance firms, is singled out as “a strong choice for banks and insurance companies,” by the report, which also noted that deficits in areas like attended automation and a reliance on a direct integration model make the company’s offering more suited for specialized use cases rather than general applications.

According to Le Clair, improvements in RPA technology have generally been led by platform vendors. He added that notable improvements have been made in robot scheduling, management, reporting and embedded text analytics for document extraction.

Looking ahead, the key considerations for determining the leading software providers in the market will be a software’s scalability and breadth of processes. Given the demand for digitization and automation of manual processes, “RPA software must be scalable and therefore suitable and appealing to business users to get damaged processes back into operations rapidly,” the report notes.

LeClair affirmed this, saying, “Most successful RPA apps are back office — unattended — about 70% with the balance agent, attended mode, or customer-facing.”

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.