More financial institutions are adopting robotic process automation (RPA) to streamline their internal processes and operations, according to industry experts at a Sibos panel Wednesday.

RPA software revenue is expected to reach $1.89 billion in 2021, up 20% year over year, and the overall RPA market is expected to grow at double-digit rates through 2024, according to global research and advisory firm Gartner in a recent report. Yet, there “is still a lot of tussle going on in terms of what [RPA software] exactly means and what it talks to,” said Jason Kingdon, CEO of BluePrism which develops the software for companies like Google, Microsoft and Lloyds Banking Group.

Robotic process automation describes software tools that use rules-based logic and structured inputs to partially or fully automate human tasks, which are often mundane and repetitive like data entry and processing transactions.

According to Kingdon, “The implications of [RPA] are still being understood, and the way it sits alongside — and makes accessible — all these kind of AI technologies, brand new capabilities you want to embed into business processes, all of that is still being understood … I would say it’s still very early days.”

Most current RPA applications are confined to simple tasks that have been completed by humans, like account opening, credit checking and the administration of accounts, Kingdon said. But their real value is more abstract, he said, like using RPA to connect siloed, legacy systems to create interoperability.

“This technology puts us in a post-legacy environment; it doesn’t matter where these assets are, we can make use of them, we can repurpose them and actually repurpose them in a very dynamic way,” Kingdon said. “We’re not constrained by legacy systems — you can actually build whole processes offered by other organizations as a service within a robotic interface.”

For the $1.97 trillion Wells Fargo, robotics play a crucial role in unlocking its 200 petabytes of data, which is roughly equal to 1 million digital photos every day for a lifetime, according to Chief Innovation Officer Lisa Frazier, who also heads up the bank’s emerging technology research efforts and internal startup accelerator.

“We’ll see more and more robotics freeing up and automating processes … it’s all about manufacturing the data and quality to actually apply AI,” Frazier said. The bank uses data technologies, like Knowledge Graph, which contextualizes data by linking metadata to create a framework for data integration and analysis. Used in concert with robotics, it helps to “simplify and understand data relationships across all data silos, so it’s an interesting space of things coming together,” she said.

The combination of robotics, AI and machine learning deliver value across customer journeys, from fraud to collections and loan decisioning and applications, according to Frazier.

Wells Fargo, for one, deploys robotics and AI to solve fraud problems. “Today, customers still receive unsolicited calls and text messages asking for PIN numbers; we receive requests for account opening from strange locations,” Frazier said. “We’re building and have built algorithms to actually help identify these anomalies in real time to prevent financial crime,” she said.

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