John Elton, chief information officer of $40 billion TIAA Bank, said during his fireside chat at the Bank Automation Summit on Wednesday that regulatory compliance is where the bank is “now really beginning to spend a lot of time.”

While Elton noted that the Jacksonville, Fla.-based bank has always been regulatory compliant, he stressed the importance of the efficiencies created by automating at the inception of the regulatory process.

“If you can improve the efficiency, that you automatically generate the evidence of that during the transaction, you can make that compliance significantly more efficient,” Elton told conference attendees Wednesday. “That may give you time to really focus on the customer much more if you can handle those compliance issues behind the scenes in a much more efficient way.”

Regulatory compliance and data aggregation are where TIAA focuses its efforts to create automated workflows, Elton said. Automation and robotic tools can help process unstructured data into a more usable, aggregated form for the banker, he added.

TIAA is starting to leverage unstructured data in complaints management, which can come in via voice at the contact center, and through surveys and web forms, Elton said.

“Certainly, from that perspective, you want to look at how can you efficiently kind of pull that data to look at are there any trends to those complaints that are going on?” he said. “That’s an area I’d like to expand our use of unstructured data and analysis.”

Missed opportunities in automation

A siloed approach to automation may mean some organizations are missing an opportunity to realize a larger impact on the organization, Elton said, noting that a better approach is to look for points of interaction.

“A lot of organizations, from what I have seen, focus on performing automation within one department or within one group and they look at those processes within groups,” Elton said. “They sometimes forget that probably the most impactful is where there are interactions, which often then bridges between groups, even within the same department.”

Evaluating interactions in which information is passed between points helps identify the different sources and systems at play, he added, pointing to commercial loans as an example.

“There’s obviously a lot of material in terms of collateral that has to come in and be reviewed and approved, so if you can use robotics to start looking at unstructured data, and pull out certain aspects of that,” Elton said. That information could go into a rules engine for credit analysis, or simply be presented in a more concise way to the credit analyst, he said.

“You’re certainly improving that efficiency, and you’re able to close that loan much, much faster,” Elton said.