Bank Automation on the Go
We are living in a digital age, where no organization or institute can be immune from the impact of automation on their operations. HR departments in the banking sector were among the first adopters of automation considering the humongous benefits that they stood to gain from introducing IT in their Payroll Management, annual appraisals, scheduling training etc.
Automation turned as boon for the HR as the benefits of these were immediate- huge savings in terms of time and manual labour, leading not just to loss of productivity, but also loss of opportunity in moving up the value chain.
Automation reduces operational redundancies and frees up time for the HR staff to engage in more productive work. This is the reason why several IT vendors have dedicated verticals to serve the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sectors to cater to their rising demand for automated processes., especially in their HR departments
Two years ago, the country’s largest private bank, ICICI Bank decided to automate 200 business processes across various functions. These functions included retail banking operations, agri-business, trade and forex, treasury, human resource management, among others. Globally, only UBS and Goldman were using AI for back-end automation, when ICICI Bank announced this massive digital initiative..
The same year, in keeping with its ‘mobile-first’ policy, Axis Bank tied-up with Active Intelligence Pte (Active.ai), a Singapore-based company to launch an intelligent chat bot that helps customers pay bills, transfer funds, manage credit card spends, and do a lot more via a voice interface.
According to a Deloitte report, AI tech and systems working on automation are going to be the next big disruptive force in the global financial industry.
The idea for software robotics has been in development for many years at ICICI bank, and was the brainwork of a 15-member in-house team working in Mumbai and Hyderabad.
Such developments, underscores the massive digital transformation that’s happening in our traditional banking space. Employee transfers are now decided by algorithms, senior manager appraisals are being done by aggregating app-based instant feedback from bosses, and data from canteen purchases is also being subject to rigorous analysis to keep tabs on the general health of the employees.
Robots are handling high-volume, time-consuming business tasks
This is leading a lot of time to bankers to focus on value-added services.
The demonetization wave has not only forced the Indian economy to go cashless, but it has also brought about a deluge of work to the bankers. To cope with all this paperwork, the BSFI industry is mulling another big transformation — use of artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline and digitalize all the otherwise tedious manual tasks.
Automation, chat bots and big data analytics programs are replacing human effort and scaling new heights in the HR departments of the banking sector. Otherwise also, with financial exclusion as high as 55-60 per cent of adult population, banks will have to hire — a number of AI and ML experts to reach out to customers in remote and rural pockets of the country, who can’t access banking services unaided.
