The banking industry is currently in the midst of a transformative migration heavily weighted towards digitization. To make this enormous shift possible, financial institutions are increasingly turning to hyperautomation. According to a KPMG report, 59% of executives say that the pandemic has accelerated their organizations’ interest in driving digital transformation.

Many people have traditional views of automation but the advances leading up to hyperautomation have changed what the former can really accomplish. Automation is the application of process robots to perform specific, standalone tasks. These are typically simple, often rote tasks such as data entry, vendor invoice processing, data extraction, or issuing payments. Hyperautomation differs in that it is built upon a foundation of automation and smart digital technologies. Through artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep analytics, hyperautomation offers potentially far more expansive outcomes and unprecedented ways to address very specific business challenges.

Industries that will benefit from hyperautomation

Hyperautomation can offer value across numerous business use cases, generating benefits for virtually every industry. However, specific sectors, stand to benefit the most – these include financial services, high-tech, retail, telecommunications, and healthcare.

These industries are well-positioned to reap the most rewards from hyperautomation because it generates so many possibilities to improve the customer experience and productivity. These include delivering hyper-personalized product offerings and cross-selling user-specific products based on their unique preferences on the business front end. It also enables organizations in these industries to automate repetitive tasks at a mass scale across their operations and improve back and middle-office performance.

Hyperautomation transforming the lending industry

While hyperautomation is already equipping financial organizations to achieve key business goals, such as reducing overhead and increasing operational productivity, it has also proven to be effective in overhauling one of the banking industry’s core business units: lending.

Financial institutions have often been more reticent to lend to SMEs because they represent a greater risk. After all, only around 50% of businesses exist beyond their fifth year. Arguably, the lack of funding can limit business success for SMEs, but lenders can leverage hyperautomation to help address the demand.

Banks have traditionally taken a one-size-fits-all approach to certain sectors and specific company sizes – generally referred to as the “Missing Middle” – which form over 90% of all businesses globally. In comparison, banks have usually viewed large corporations as much more likely to repay loans. Now, hyperautomation can help banks access the enormous SME lending market by providing much more precise, timely credit and risk in loan application analyses.

Hyperautomation can reduce application decisions from weeks to a matter of hours and analyze documents and financial data from each business loan applicant for more precise credit decisions. For instance, hyperautomation solutions can help financial institutions modernize their back-office lending infrastructure with automated, accurate documentation classification and rich data extraction. Hyperautomation can also help banks avoid regulatory fines and reputational risk by improving anti-fraud performance associated with lending.

By incorporating technologies that enable the banks to hyperautomate their lending business, they gain greater access to a broader client pool while also making precise, data-driven lending decisions.