Citizens Bank recently finished work on automating parts of its commercial bank underwriting.

Vinay Jha, chief data officer at the $176 billion Citizens Bank, said the completed project allows for the importing of data from the financial statements of its commercial borrowers, some of which are in paper form.

While the process was “highly manual,” earlier, Jha said Citizens is also now using robotic process automation (RPA) to add efficiency and reduce error that emerged when workers had to manually transfer data from one place to the other.

“If we can accelerate the financial statement spreading process, we are able to do underwriting makes more faster,” he said.

The Providence, R.I.-based bank had about $61 billion of commercial loans on its balance sheet at the end of last quarter.

Jha made the comments during a Bank Automation News webinar today. Also on the webinar panel was Ian Dunn, general manager-portfolio analytics at cloud banking firm nCino. The firm counts TD Bank, Santander Bank and Truist Financial among its clients.

Dunn said that while automation has indeed picked up in retail banking, it is less utilized in commercial, given how deals are traditionally structured.

“Those that can infuse analytics and insights into every major decision,” he said, will be the ones “that are going to thrive going forward.”

“There [are] certainly some barriers on the commercial front,” he added.

Jha said Citizens began its automation journey in 2019 and has been reaping gains since.

“Automation is just not about monitoring what is happening and doing it in an efficient way,” said Jha, explaining the bank’s approach towards implementation. “But what we are also looking at is the aspect [of] how we can do some of the preventive steps.”

Citizens Bank runs automated data quality checks and uses automation to actively monitor the data it collects, Jha added. Jha and Dunn said that automation enabled real-time monitoring of data lets them to keep a constant eye on emerging risk patterns.

Dunn said by using automation banks are, “actively analyzing … borrowers … [and] actively monitoring the business environment our clients operate in,” adding that this allows the provider to predictively look for risks.

nCino has a market capitalization of about $6 billion.

Citizens is leveraging bots for automation, but Jha would not specify how many bots currently work at Citizens. He said that the bank deploys them across verticals such as risk, operations, and cybersecurity.

While he said that it is important for financial institutions to actively think about artificial intelligence and machine learning since they are seeping into different use cases, “I think the most important thing, from my perspective, is the people. We need to upskill our resources, our talent, to make sure that they are leveraging this data,” he said.