Good day and welcome to the Buzz, a podcast by Bank Automation News. I’m Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson. Automation Anywhere recently announced several new offerings aimed at supporting citizen developer programs. I sat down with vendor’s CIO, Sumit Johar, as well as Ken Mertzel, who is the global industry lead for financial services at Automation Anywhere. We discussed the citizen developer trend. My first question of course: Does Automation Anywhere use citizens developers internally and what advice can the RPA company offer about such programs? Mr. Johar started the conversation, saying it’s actually a program he hopes to expand.

Sumit Johar
Yes, we do. As a matter of fact, I’m in the process of expanding that model. Right now, we do have a center of excellence in a team internally that my team is sort of leading. And you know, there is participation from multiple departments internally, whether it is finance, legal, HR, all these teams have identified a few, I would say, bot champions, bot warriors or whatever you want to call them. And they work very closely with this central team. And like I was explaining to you the model, the way it works is we collectively debate about what are the right use cases, these teams bring ideas to us. We work with them explained to them whether these are the right use cases for automation or not, where can you get the value faster than than others? Right. And then there are, you know, they are able to deploy, sorry, not deployed, they are able to build their own bots by themselves. But once the bots are ready, they come back work with us we help them deploy in a way that is that is consistent with best practices and secure.

Ken Mertzel
Yeah, I think the other thing I’d say, just looking at the banking industry, I mean, first of all, even though, obviously, automation 360 is a new release, citizen development or the ability to conduct you know, create your own bots is not new. I mean, from from day one, our platform, as you know, it was very easy to use and easy to scale. So you’re not really using coding language. But on top of that, we are seeing banks where they are moving towards citizen development, I’d say the most common is where rather than every single employee and organization developing bots, you find particularly in areas where there are a lot of opportunities where they’ll have selected people with the training. And then on top of that, even for areas where maybe someone is in development, but I think the platform now particularly with the automation anywhere robotic interface, is making it much easier for any employee to actually interact with a bot. So you know, whether that’s in a call center, or what have you, and I think that’s probably the major development within automation. 360 is that, I mean, certainly, just as it was before anyone could develop a bot. But I think even more importantly, as anyone can easily interact with a bot, because you have that easy, web based interface, such that you’re not necessarily interacting with all the systems behind the scenes, you know, directly, even all the bots that are set up.

Loraine Lawson
What would you say to banks that are on the fence about citizen developers? What should they know?

Ken Mertzel
Well, I think a couple things. Again, I think it should be managed in the appropriate manner. So I think some of the concerns I have is around citizen development or to what extent, you know, there’s going to be governance and controls. And so I think, you know, some of the things I mentioned before, first of all, you know, you know, the platform has that built in governance and control. So, even if someone has developed a bot, you know, that best practices that you’ll leverage a CoE, or some organization, obviously, do, you know, QA over those spots before they’re put in production, which gives, you know, organizations more confidence opposed to, you know, people, creating bots without that level of governance. So I think that’s critical, I think another is ensuring individuals are getting the appropriate training. And, you know, as you know, we have an automation anywhere University, we have, you know, over a million users that are trained now, so getting them the appropriate training, you know, online and also directly from the seabees is absolutely critical to, and then the fact that now, you know, again, it’s web and cloud based is easier to deploy that across organizations to So I think, you know, organization is looking at a mix of citizen development, and deploying it, you know, with the appropriate controls, you know, in areas where there are concentrated opportunities.

Loraine Lawson
What opportunities do you see in financial services to deploy more automation? Are there missed opportunities out there that banks really should focus on?

Ken Mertzel
Yeah, I can speak to that summit. So yeah, I think, you know, first of all, as you mentioned, I’m Financial Services is the leading industry in terms of leveraging RPA. And that’s across the entire industry. And certainly, it’s, you know, one of the largest sectors in terms of our own our own customer base. So you know, they are leveraging and heavily, I think, where I see that the trend, in terms of additional areas of focus this historically, there was more focused on back office operational processes. And increasingly going forward, I see much more emphasis around how can we improve the customer spirit experience and focus on front office opportunities, I think part of that is enabled, you know, as we talked about before, by, you know, the automation anywhere, 360 products, and in particular, that, you know, admission, where robotic interface or RA, where, particularly, for example, if you’re on a call center, and in a typical environment, we have multiple screens in front of you, and you have to access all types of different systems at once, to just try to get basic information about the customer, I think organizations are seeing that there’s a huge opportunity to leverage, you know, the robotic interface such that A, you can get sort of a single, you know, single view of the customer and be when you need to execute a particular customer request, you can leverage customized forms, which for that contact center agent will say, hey, these are the things that you need to get from the customer, and then populate that, and then behind the scenes, the interface, and the bots are then reaching out to all the different systems to execute. So there’s a lot more opportunity now for individuals who have Customer Contact, to actually spend more time actually servicing the customer, as opposed to all the sort of, you know, manual, repetitive stops, and a lot of the, you know, note taking out after the fact. So I think that’s one major area of focus that the second one I’d say is that in terms of where the technology is going on, obviously, over time, there’s not very tight and a great more and more, you know, artificial intelligence, machine learning capabilities. And so I see where there’s opportunities to not only automate manual repetitive processes, but to take some of those things where there might be an exception process and now leverage machine learning to determine how you’re going to process that or in in critical areas and banking, such as any money laundering or loan underwriting where you can leverage machine learning to identify, you know, where you have particular risk, how you want to make certain decisions. And to your point, that’s particularly critical, as you mentioned early on in terms of eliminating those false positives, because that’s, as you know, one of the biggest challenges KYC AML is those false alerts that then require, you know, a lot of time spent on doing additional research. And so we’re seeing more advancements in terms of leveraging those technologies to, you know, get a better picture of risk.

Loraine Lawson
And conversely, instead, you have a very broad view, working with lots of different companies and financial institutions or their, or their big mistakes that you see companies or financial institutions make when deploying RPA. And how can they fix those? That particular mistake, sir? Yeah,

Ken Mertzel
I don’t know if I call them mistakes. But they’re certainly lessons learned, I would say from the most successful ones. As I mentioned, we have many customers in the financial services industry and other industries that are deploying hundreds or 1000s of bots. And I’d say what Dryden what differentiates those that are the most successful are a couple of things we touched on. So one is certainly having that federated model, you know, so having a centralized area of expertise doesn’t need to be a huge department, but just something where you’re ensuring consistency in terms of how you’re leveraging and deploying the technology. That combined with again, making sure that you’re really working in coordination with the businesses and having those points of contact in a business to really, you know, obviously much more familiar with the operations within an area and can help better prioritize and Design Automation opportunities. So I think that’s one differentiator. Another is absolutely executive support. I think we’re seeing a lot of organizations realize, particularly with a pandemic, that there’s a real need for digital transformation. And given the limited number of resources that all organizations have, how can we leverage our employees fast and take advantage of some of these technologies. So executive support is key not not just from a budget standpoint, but frankly, you want to make sure that you’re getting the input and and leveraging the expertise of individuals in those areas, you’re automating to ensure automating things the right way. So I think that’s absolutely critical as well. And then lastly, again, it’s just making sure that you’re leveraging, you know, platforms such as our where you do have that those centralized controls, and all the things I described and trigger having the appropriate, you know, governance over your, your automations.

Loraine Lawson
I want me to ask you about governance. And that will be my last question. It’s sort of an emerging discussion, it seems to me me, I don’t know, maybe you can say whether or not that’s true. But is there advice you have about governing bots within an organization, specifically a financial services firms, as people sort of, are playing catch up on governance?

Ken Mertzel
Yeah, I think the key is to make sure that you have the governance set right up front that again, part of the platform itself, obviously gives you part of that, but you know, that’s not alone. So again, I know, I keep mentioning the center of excellence, but it’s key from a governance standpoint, so that you’re you’re establishing certain guidelines in terms of these is how these are how bots should be deployed, you might even have, we have the capability to, you know, for clients to develop an internal bots store, so that you can say, hey, for these types of automations, you should leverage these types of capabilities. So, you know, governance is key. And I often tell organizations, I talk a lot, not only to financial services companies, but also finance organizations, given my background, and as you can imagine, finance and accounting is all about governance and control. And so, you know, my guidance to those organizations to is, is even when you’ve automated a process, you should absolutely maintain the same level of governance and control, you would over an automated process as you would over manual process. So you need to have an understanding of exactly what that process is, whether you’re back backup plans extend upstream or downstream, you know, data sources or processes change, and how you’re going to adapt, you know, again, either whether that’s a manual process or an automated process to be able to handle that. So change management is absolutely critical to successful automation, and again, that the center of excellence can help businesses maintain that.

Loraine Lawson
Okay, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about or say?

Sumit Johar, CIO
I don’t think there’s anything else. The only thing I would want to add from my side, I will we were talking about some of the internal use cases that we are looking at deploying internally, right, I gave you an example. I want security. And Ken was just talking about compliance. So I want to give you an example, about compliance but which is more generic applies to any organization, not just banking. One thing that I’ve noticed consistently especially if you’re a highly regulated business, is that the audits that happen internal audits that take place and they could be for any reason whether it’s your your acquiring a certification in PCI Sox, ISO, etc, doesn’t matter. These audits are extremely repetitive and extremely lengthy and error prone In my team, we are ISO certified company, by the way. So in my team, we used to spend weeks to complete some of these internal audits in the past. And when we started looking at the use cases where we can apply our own technology, compliance turned out to be one of the best cases, because these processes are completely repetitive, and can be easily automated, especially if you’re using a technology like RPA. We are able to achieve these complete this audits, internal audits in days, not weeks anymore. So I just wanted to highlight some of that example. Because it applies everywhere, no matter which company which kind of in sector, you’re you’re working.

Loraine Lawson
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