The Increased Role of Technology in Banking

Risk and compliance are two areas of the utmost importance to the banking industry.  Meeting the regulatory needs relating to these functions can be a daunting undertaking.  Technology has become a valuable partner to the industry, providing opportunities to automate some of the more repetitive and laborious tasks, boosting efficiency and drastically reducing human error.  Banks are under constant attack and having the right systems in place can be a true competitive advantage.

The Challenge of Risk and Compliance

Banks today have become electronic fortresses under relentless siege by money launderers and cyber thieves. Besides the losses they incur from theft, banks must invest significant funds and resources to comply with government regulations to have processes in place to limit and detect crime through Know Your Customer, Anti -Money Laundering, and Customer Due Diligence (KYC/AML/CDD) operations.

Failure to adhere to anti-money laundering protocols can be costly. Surveys show banks are being fined at record levels for not complying with customer due diligence requirements, with a total of $15.13 billion in fines being levied in 2020, and with U.S. banks accounting for 73 percent of those violations.

The outlook is even worse as cyber criminals become ever more sophisticated and banks face rising levels of losses and risk. The amount of money being laundered through the financial services industry is estimated at $6 trillion annually, or between 2 and 5 percent of the global domestic product (GDP). However, studies show that the banking industry’s effectiveness rate in detecting suspicious activities is less than 5 percent, while the total cost for maintaining AML compliance is more than $180 billion annually.

A Herculean Task

Performing due diligence, monitoring the movement of funds, and identifying suspicious activity is difficult and expensive. Compliance regulations require banks to perform background checks that involve collecting and analyzing a massive amount of customer and business information, including the customer’s name, photo identification, address, phone number, email address, occupation, tax identification number, business model, source of funds, beneficial ownership, and more.

Background checks also involve screening against politically exposed person (PEP), session initiation protocol (SIP), Real Capital Analytics (RCA), and global sanction records and lists. Once a customer’s identity, location, and type of business is established, banks typically create customer risk profiles and risk assessments and assign different risk levels and scores to indicate the level of money laundering risk they pose.  High-risk customers will require need more in-depth due diligence and more ongoing monitoring than low-risk customers.

Only Getting Worse

Fraudsters and money launderers, meanwhile, are developing ever more complex methods of defrauding banks. This includes taking advantage of synthetic identities, data breaches, the dark web, and faster funds movement. So skilled have cyber criminals become at their art that only 1 percent of their illicit activities result in financial assets being frozen or seized.

The task of detecting and preventing bank fraud has become even more difficult during the COVID pandemic as governments disperse pandemic-relief financial aid with often marginal oversight and as stay-at-home consumers manage their finances and order more of their goods and services online.

Weak Defenses

Many banks have systems in place that are ill-equipped to perform all of the necessary background and risk scoring actions while keeping pace with the identity masking and laundering cloaking tactics of the cyber criminals in real time. The inadequacy of their detection capability is reflected in the fact that 95 percent or more of the events flagged by banks turn out to be false positives.

Besides relying on manual processes, many banks have outmoded IT infrastructures and lack of intelligent automation systems that make their background checking and real-time detection capabilities too slow and inadequate to catch the cyber criminals.

The Answer Is Intelligent Automation

The good news is that advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), intelligent process orchestration, and cloud infrastructures give banks a more effective arsenal to combat cyber crime.

Intelligent automation systems raise the bar by eliminating the repetitive, slow, complex, and error-prone tasks that are often performed manually. AI-driven automation can gather information, perform analyses, and identify suspicious patterns more rapidly to enable banks to catch financial crimes as they occur rather than too late.

Intelligent automation systems can run unattended to generate alarms and take action, and can generate visualizations that can help investigators monitor and detect crimes more quickly and effectively. Automation can improve the scoring methods used by investigators to identify fraud, which can reduce the amount of false positive cases and raise the success rate. Automating manual tasks not only improves efficiency, but can free investigators to focus on higher-level fraud detection activities.

Better Infrastructure, Better Results

Because fraud detection is based on gathering and analyzing data, the key to getting the best results is to deploy the most effective and flexible infrastructure for aggregating, integrating, and manipulating data. Many banks fall woefully short in these areas because of outdated IT environments and fragmented data repositories that cannot be easily connected or integrated.

Banks can significantly boost their fraud detection capabilities by modernizing their infrastructures. This includes unifying their data and implementing container-based cloud architectures and agile development environments coupled with intelligent automation and advanced analytics. Flexible architectures that employ continuous development and integration models enable banks to adapt quickly to new technologies, methodologies, and threats as they arise.

 Why Roth Automation for KYC/AML/CDD Automation?

Roth Automation’s expert consultants and engineers have years of experience designing, deploying, and optimizing business automation processes for national and global banking institutions.  Our expertise can assist you modernizing and optimizing your infrastructure and applying intelligent automation to more effectively perform KYC/AML/CDD operations.

To learn how your organization can benefit from intelligent automation applied to KYC/AML/CDD operations, speak with our expert consultants today.

Remodeling Traditional OCR

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has unleashed a wave of innovation that is rippling across every industry. Among the most dramatic advances is the infusion of AI and deep learning into optical character recognition (OCR), which offers businesses significant new benefits via new modes of intelligent document management.

As Information Age notes, “AI OCR tools are sleeping giants in the wider topic of digital transformation.”

OCR has been an important element of document image processing systems since the early 1990s.  The business value of OCR is derived from its ability to convert paper documents or images into searchable and readable documents, such as Word and PDF files, that can be stored in computer systems and accessed companywide.

Once converted into readable and searchable digital documents, electronic files can be stored in computer systems rather than folders, file cabinets, and warehouses. The digitized documents also can be easily modified rather than having to be retyped, which can add great value through flexible document management. All these factors have enabled businesses to increase efficiency and reduce cost using OCR-based imaging and document management systems.

OCR Stumbling Blocks

However, there are a number of impediments that have limited the capability of OCR and added labor and cost, including difficulty in deciphering handwriting, in recognizing certain typefaces and characters, and in discerning poor resolution images, seals, stamps, tables, and other document elements that frustrate traditional OCR systems.

Among the most significant OCR weaknesses is its dependence on document templates. Invoices, for example, can present an endless variety of layouts. A template must be created for each individual invoice for OCR to be able to know where to locate and read specific types of information within the fields of the document.

For each unique form or invoice, templates must be designed and the OCR system must be trained to recognize the fields within the documents. In instances in which OCR cannot recognize data, workers must review the documents and correct the information manually. These drawbacks reduce the efficiency of OCR and add cost.

AI Revolution Changes the Game

The AI revolution has been a game changer, infusing intelligence into systems across all industries. Besides advances in data science, the key factors that have contributed to the AI revolution include more powerful CPUs, massive amounts of inexpensive storage in the cloud, and in-memory computing.

The application of AI, machine learning, and deep learning to OCR is called intelligent data processing (IDP) and intelligent data capture (IDC), among other names. Machine Learning and Deep Learning are subsets of AI that are capable of self-learning, which can continually improve OCR’s recognition and analytical capabilities.

Advanced AI Transforms OCR

IDP improves OCR’s recognition capabilities by applying the most advanced AI technologies, including advanced algorithms, feature and pattern recognition techniques, natural language processing, neural networks, and machine vision.

A major advantage of IDP over traditional OCR systems is the elimination of the need for document templates. Through the ability to identify any field and data type in any document layout, IDP systems can locate and identify company names, dates, dollar amounts, order details, etc., regardless of where they appear in a document.

IDP systems can extract and analyze data from more complex documents than can traditional OCR systems. Besides improving the process of converting printed documents into readable and searchable digital formats, IDP can improve the indexing and categorizing of documents, and can add even greater value through the ability to understand the context of data within documents.

IDP can reduce the time, labor, and cost of document management, and can increase revenues and profits by applying business intelligence to the data extracted from documents and shared with other systems.

IDP Business Benefits

IDP offers benefits to organizations of all sizes and across all industries. IDP can improve the processing of forms, invoices, receipts, and other documents common to every business and agency, as well as industry-specific documents. These include core business processes such as document storage and retrieval, mailroom automation, HR automation, and data entry.

In applying IDP and business intelligence to mailroom automation, for example, incoming documents can be automatically analyzed, sorted, and routed to the appropriate business units. Data relevant to decision making can be extracted and incorporated in business analytics systems. Workflows can be created in which routed data is merged and analyzed.

Applying IDP to documents as they are converted also can improve security, fraud detection, compliance, and disaster recovery.

IDP Boost

Document-intensive fields like banking, finance, insurance, government, and healthcare have been reaping the efficiency boosting and cost-saving benefits of OCR systems for years. With the rise of IDP, these industries are able to reap a new round of productivity and analytical benefits.

Banks, for example, are using IDP to process a wide range of forms and documents, from personal and corporate account documents to mortgage documents and credit application applications. Personal and corporate mortgage applications alone can consist of a host of document types, including tax returns, salary slips, desired purchase documentation, bank statements, photo ID, inheritance verification, income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements.

These documents contain data that must be digitized, searched, extracted, and verified. Manual processing can require weeks of labor and can introduce errors. Moreover, documents must be shared among different workers who need to access different information, sometimes simultaneously.

IDP enables the entire mortgage application process to be seamlessly automated. The IDP system can extract and verify data from all the supporting documents and update the core systems and databases. The IDP system can initiate any further processing that might be required and can flag exceptions that require human workers to resolve.

Similar IDP advantages can be seen in the insurance industry, where data from thousands of claims can be extracted, merged, and analyzed for trends and patterns that can provide valuable business insights.

In the healthcare field, IDP systems are improving the processing of medical reports, laboratory tests, invoices, insurance agreements, and other documents. Once the data is extracted, it can be routed and shared with other parties and systems. Patient symptoms and laboratory test results, for example, can be extracted and fed into specialized AI systems to aid in patient diagnoses.

Similar IDP advantages can be seen in industries across the board, including energy, travel, hospitality, transportation, manufacturing, government, and retail.

A Bright AI Future

The power of AI is increasing exponentially as IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and many other major players pour money and resources into AI research and development.

By deploying AI-based OCR today, your organization will be positioned to reap an increasing wealth of benefits for years to come.

Why Roth Automation for IDP and AI-Based OCR?

Roth Automation’s expert consultants and engineers have years of experience designing, deploying, and optimizing business automation processes. Roth Automation is partnering with best-of-breed providers to create state-of-the-art AI-based OCR solutions. Our combined expertise can assist you in accruing the maximum efficiency and cost-reduction benefits that can be gained by deploying AI-based OCR.

 

‘As a Service’ is at your service- Employ Technology

In nearly every office across the globe, there are repetitive tasks being performed by employees.  In nearly all of these instances, the tasks are performed with enough frequency that they require neither the oversight, nor the skillset, of the person in charge of execution.  Regardless of how mundane they may be, these are tasks are detailed, and need specific attention. At the same time, they need to be done quickly and without error.  This was the concept behind Robotic Process Automation (RPA).  Can a software 'bot' take care of these tasks faster, and with more accuracy than their human counterpart?  If this were possible, how much more could the company achieve with the excess bandwidth of its human employees?  After all, the true intent of automation is not about the elimination of workforce, but rather the enablement and empowerment of their strengths and capabilities.

Like most newer concepts/products though, RPA has come at a price that was not conducive to all businesses.  Be it through a financial, technical, or operational roadblock, it has often been one that precluded smaller companies from taking advantage of the benefits. RPAaaS (Robotic Process Automation as a Service) has now changed all of that.

Bringing it to the Masses

The greatest tool or product can exist, but if a company can’t find a way to implement into their environment, it has no value.  In many ways, that has been the RPA journey for many businesses.  No matter the capabilities, too many factors stood in the way of purchasing RPA bots.  Budgeting, flexibility, sustainability, and implementation are four operational areas where the story has really started to change, opening the door to much more widespread opportunity for adoption.

On-Demand is in demand

Access

Enterprise companies want to own their solutions.  Cost is not usually as big of a barrier in that space.  To purchase RPA requires a large initial investment. Typically end users purchase individual bots in addition to the first year’s maintenance.  These are upfront costs.  Before even beginning to consider the added expense of training and implementation, it is not uncommon to be in the vicinity of an $18-$20K investment for a single bot.  When purchased as a subscription however, the entire path to implementation changes.

Capex vs Opex

As the dollar amount becomes evident, companies find themselves needing to determine how they will pay for the investment.  When buying the software outright, many companies will determine that this should be considered a capital expense.  This poses many challenges.  Red tape, and time to approval can be enormous barriers.  Multi-tiered approvals, typically from those who have some distance from the problem being addressed, can blur the overarching purpose of the project.  The cost can also be viewed as a hinderance to other projects and be pushed back or rejected.  Remember, these are repetitive tasks with a clear process.  It is easy to argue that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ and simply move on, ignoring the efficiency and productivity that could be gained.

Even when approved, decision makers may put unreasonable expectations on the number of years the product needs to be in service to reach a desired return value. Buyers can find themselves in an awkward position of purchasing beyond their need/capability because the thought is that the solution needs to last X number of years to get the full value/return.  Alternately a product is bought that is obsolete too quickly in a counterproductive effort to reduce the expense.  This is an incredibly difficult balance to achieve.

In the RPAaaS model, the expense can be allocated as an operational expense.  In the 'pay as you go' model, though contracts will be in place, the term can be made more reasonable and palatable.  This is especially true in terms of supporting infrastructure.  In that the solution is hosted, the end user can avoid the additional in house hardware expenses, and simultaneously pass the security and compliance risk to the provider.  In addition to avoiding many of these issues, there are benefits that can be realized in the flexibility and scalability of the on demand model.

Stop buying a tool and focus on a solution

Flexibility and Sustainability

As mentioned, the purchase of software can leave a company at a disadvantage.  As the product evolves contracts don't always allow the end user to move in parallel.  In the 'as a service' model, the end user can often work with their vendor to upgrade or pivot their course to take advantage of the latest and greatest offering.  Another invaluable benefit is the option of scaling up/down the solution.  Many companies have seasonal changes, natural rises and dips, in their workload that can drastically modify needs.  RPAaaS accounts for these changes and offers the flexibility to still take advantage without the cumbersome and overreaching requirements of ownership.

At your service- Membership has its privileges

Partnership

According to a 2019 EY study 30-50% of RPA implementations fail.  Reasons vary, but a common theme is the undertaking itself.  RPA is not an "out of the box" experience.  There is a large amount of internal knowledge and product knowledge necessary to kick off a successful project.  Often times the in-house bandwidth and/or capabilities are underestimated or simply do not exist.  Training, testing, and maintenance of the process can be a daunting undertaking without the proper resources to handle the demand.  In the RPAaaS model, companies have the cushion of a built-in expert.  Traditional models do offer a level of support but where/when/how the support is offered is really at the whim of the manufacturer.  RPAaaS is more like a partnership.  You are getting the expert team as part of the service, not just through onboarding.  From design and architecture through launch, testing, production, and beyond, the service provider has a vested interest in your success that just doesn't exist when working with the manufacturer.  This relationship is where RPAaaS can really blossom and from a tool to a solution.

Companies can find a great deal of freedom in the advantages of RPAaaS.  By putting the control in the hands of the end user, the playing field has been opened to small and medium sized businesses.  The barriers of purchase had often excluded smaller companies who now can wield the power of this transformative technology to compete.

At Roth Automation, we identify repeatable processes that are worthwhile automating and provide a return on their investment. Although this will identify processes appropriate for RPA, the Roth team looks at the entire business process to insure that, by automating one task, we don’t create bottlenecks elsewhere in the process. Automating a single task in a business process provides savings and efficiencies, but not as much as automating the entire process. RPA is just one of the tools we use and can often be used in conjunction with other valuable automation tools such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Conversational AI.  Hyperautomation pairs these technologies to tackle all aspects of your workflow.

Through Roth Automation, companies of all sizes can now take advantage of the technology to reduce costs, increase productivity and streamline their business process. As machine learning and AI capabilities continue to improve, business process automation and intelligent document processing become even more valuable. Speak with the Roth Automation team about how we can offer RPAaaS at an affordable price and how we deploy these technologies in a synergistic way to make your business run more efficiently.

RPA? Right This Way

August 24, 2021, Paramus, New Jersey - Roth Automation, a US based Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) services and solutions provider, today announced the launch of their Robotic Process Automation as a Service (RPAaaS) offering.

Providing affordable RPA opens the floodgate of capabilities derived from the solution while removing the barriers that have too often made RPA an 'enterprise only' solution.  This model is provided at a reduced expense without the sacrifice of performance or functionality.

Roth Automation President and CEO shared his excitement by saying: "This is a game changer for small and medium sized businesses. We are thrilled to have the ability to bring RPA to a more general audience that is in great need."

RPA is a technology through which software bots to perform the high volume, repetitive tasks.  Mimicking human behavior, these bots can log into applications, compile data, and perform calculations that are time consuming and prone to human error.  RPA has historically been cost prohibitive but Roth Automation has managed to put together a pricing model that is inclusive of the small and medium companies with pressing demand for RPA in order to compete and thrive.  Presenting RPA as a Service (RPAaaS) gives access to the tools without the immense burden that can typically befall adopters.

"As a Service" is a pricing model that has grown increasing popular in software solutions over the last 10 years.  Rather than the incurring the cost of initial purchase, users pay a monthly subscription fee that provides access in a more manageable fashion.

Director of Services Jason Haber goes further to explain: "The desire to stay relevant and to innovate has been difficult when the short term financial obligations overshadow the long term benefits.  After all, when cost savings is the primary driver of implementation, the single budgetary line item cannot hijack the overarching company goals."

Learn more here about the transformative applications and benefits of RPA.

About Roth Automation:

Roth Automation (RA) is a systems integration specialist that provides Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) services and solutions. Leveraging best of breed, cutting edge technologies, RA works with customers to clearly define their needs and requirements in order to provide tailored solutions that bring improved productivity and efficiency to their business-critical processes. For more information, visit www.rothautomation.com.

Small Businesses Thrive with Access to RPA

While large enterprises tend to be the first to access and adopt new automation technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the good news is that affordable enterprise-grade RPA solutions are now available for small and medium-size businesses.  This trend will be welcome news as these companies aim to compete with the enterprise in the marketplace.

The maturation of artificial intelligence (AI) has triggered an explosion in AI-based automation applications. Among the most game-changing AI-based automation technologies is RPA, which can increase productivity, reduce cost, aid decision making, increase customer satisfaction, ensure compliance, and more.

Universal Appeal of RPA

Like word processing and email, RPA is a technology whose usefulness cuts across all industries and that offers benefits to businesses of all sizes.

Just as there are business processes common to every size business—such as billing, invoice processing, payroll, employee onboarding, customer service, financial analysis, and business planning—every size business can benefit from the application of RPA.

Let RPA Do the Grunt Work

Every size business has accounting ledgers, customer databases, invoices, accounts payable, HR forms, payroll, and other data-entry applications that are repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone when performed manually. These applications are ideal candidates for SMBs to reap the benefits of RPA.

The value of RPA begins with the automation of basic data-entry operations that include:

• Entering data into forms
• Merging data into reports and filling out templates
• Automating workflows to streamline repetitive tasks
• Moving data between spreadsheets and analytics software
• Entering customer data into text fields

RPA - From Crawling to Running the Web

While web searches can yield valuable information for many business uses—such as discovering prices, trends, prospective buyers, and competitive information—searching can be a time-consuming and tedious process for human workers.

For sales teams, for example, finding prospects and building contact lists is key part of their operations. Manual searching can consume hours of a salesperson’s time. RPA bots can perform these operations, freeing sales teams to devote their time to engaging prospects and winning more business.

Performing searches to find prospects, discovering information to personalize engagement with prospects, and reaching out to prospects in personalized ways are just some of ways that RPA bots can automate and leverage searching on behalf of a small and mid-sized business.

RPA bots can be programmed to crawl the web tirelessly to discover relevant information, return it, populate applications, analyze, and act on the information.

Give Customer Service an RPA Boost

Customer service is an area in which RPA can provide an abundance of benefits, including cost-savings, increased revenues through personalization, increased cross-selling and upselling opportunities, and improvements in loyalty and overall customer satisfaction.

Chatbots have become ubiquitous on business web sites because they can handle customer inquiries 24/7 and reduce the burden on human customer service reps. AI-based chatbots also can learn and collect and analyze customer interactions to improve service and customer satisfaction.

When fielding customer calls and inquiries, customer service reps must pull up customer records and identify key elements of the customer’s account. Orders and refunds also are processed. By automating these routine tasks, RPA bots enable human customer service reps to devote more time and attention to helping customers, resolving issues, and building better customer relationships.

Our recent article about Hyperautomation describes how combining RPA with conversational AI can magnify the benefits beyond those that could be gained by each technology individually. By implementing RPA solutions, SMBs can position themselves to gain further benefits of this  type of Hyperautomation.

Quick ROI for QuickBooks Automation

A large majority (about 75%) of the millions of U.S. small businesses use QuickBooks for accounting. RPA can improve efficiency and lower costs by handling many of the repetitive accounting tasks involved in QuickBooks accounting, including:

• Importing QuickBooks invoices into Excel spreadsheet rows
• Generating sales receipts in QuickBooks for updated MS Excel spreadsheets,
• Generating MS Excel rows for new QuickBooks payments
• Creating rows in Excel for QuickBooks expenses
• Updating mailing service subscriber lists to include new QuickBooks customer
• Sending email notifications for new QuickBooks invoices and payments.

Not only can SMBs accrue savings in time and money by eliminating time spent on routine and repetitive data-entry tasks, finance workers can spend more time focusing on analysis and financial planning to generate more revenues and profits.  The same efficiency can be gained by automating other SMB accounting and core business applications like Sage Software, Salesforce, and SAP.

Making a Business Case for RPA

Besides the above examples, there are many time-consuming and costly operations that can benefit by being automated by RPA systems, including eligibility checking, returns processing, contract management, payroll processing, and storing and analyzing information.

A simple way to determine the business case and ROI of applying RPA to a particular business process is to answer the following questions:

• How repetitive is your process?
• How many man-hours does it take to complete?
• How much does it cost in terms of workforce and maintenance?
• What is the cost of automating the process?

RPA can be added to existing businesses applications easily and with little disruption. In many cases, you’ll find that RPA can improve efficiency, boost productivity, save money, and provide a spectrum of added business benefits.

Why Roth Automation for Affordable SMB RPA Solutions?

Roth Automation’s expert consultants and engineers have years of experience designing, deploying, and optimizing business automation processes. Our relationship with affordable RPA solutions providers enables us to offer uniquely affordable solutions tailored to the needs of SMB organizations, including RPAaas (as a Service).

To learn how your organization can benefit from our affordable RPA solutions, and RPAaaS, speak with our expert consultants today.