Finance

2021 IS THE YEAR FOR DIGITAL WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT IN FINANCIAL SERVICES

By Tyler Suss, Product Marketing Director at Kofax

Even before the pandemic, the UK financial services sector viewed digital transformation as a high priority. Though adoption of robotic process automation (RPA) technologies was already underway, the pandemic truly upended operations.

When health mandates closed offices, the ability to manage operations became more challenging and complex. Many processes still aren’t fully integrated or automated, leaving remote workers with the challenge of having to bridge the gaps in fragmented and often labour-intensive processes. More than ever, they need a digital environment in which back-office processes are automated end-to-end to be productive.

Consumers, too, are learning new ways to manage financial transactions in a COVID-19 world. They’re becoming more comfortable with mobile banking and cashless payments, behaviours likely to stick once the pandemic ends. As KPMG notes, improving productivity and meeting new customer expectations for engagement are the sector’s top priorities for the coming year.

That means firms will need to move even more quickly to digitally transform their operations if they want to remain competitive. In 2021, intelligent automation and digital workflow transformation will become the main vehicles for driving employee productivity and customer experience.

Tyler Suss

The Next Priority: Digital Workforce Management

There are many reasons why an intelligent automation program combined with digital workforce management will accelerate digital transformation, but the four that follow build a strong case for adopting this approach in 2021.

Workforce Orchestration

RPA caught on like wildfire because it made automating routine, mundane tasks simple and fast. Motivation-killing work like monotonous, cut-and-paste data entry is now a drudgery of the past. What’s next? For savvy financial firms, 2021 will be all about harnessing their RPA automation expertise—and leveraging it with complementary technologies like process orchestration and document intelligence to automate their mission-critical business and create high-value workflows.

With an open intelligent automation platform, financial firms will be able to orchestrate work across people, in-house technologies, and third-party RPA bots. They can assign the right worker, whether it’s a human or digital worker, to the right task at the right time, while maintaining total control over the complexity and cost associated with a given task or project. Additionally, they can take advantage of more advanced AI technologies as they emerge.

Risk Management and Security

In financial services especially, it’s crucial that automated processes meet audit and compliance requirements. Security is also of paramount importance, with risk mitigation being a high priority. Yet many firms don’t properly consider the security risks associated with RPA, such as the access software robots have to sensitive data. As human and digital workforces merge, a single governance environment is vital.

Central control allows managers to synchronise software robot releases with broader IT system updates, minimising disruptions and failures among the digital workforce. Robust digital workforce management software lets companies secure and monitor how information is used by all resources. The integration of identity management with financial security solutions supports unified governance over the access human and digital workers have to sensitive systems and applications.

Financial firms also need a way to address potential misuse of digital worker credentials. A sophisticated solution supports the segregation of duties, in which functions are spread out across people and departments. Managers can ensure a particular individual doesn’t have access to too much sensitive information based on the combination of digital workers they oversee.

It’s also important to remember that a digital workforce management solution should enable the organisation to manage and enforce policy controls throughout the entire lifecycle of the digital worker, from creation all the way through decommissioning. Control over the entire lifespan of digital workers enhances security, compliance and auditability.

Total visibility into operations across the firm

In order to drive continuous improvement, achieving—and maintaining—total visibility into all resources performing tasks within a process is essential. Financial services firms need to be able to answer such questions as:

What tasks are being worked on?

What’s in the pipeline?

How does process performance compare with KPIs?

An intelligent automation platform including process discovery and visualisation provides insight into business processes across the enterprise. Executives and managers get a holistic view overcoming the boundaries between departmental silos, making it easier to identify opportunities for digital workforce automation that can have a greater impact across the entire firm.

Scalability

The requirement to keep pace with changes in consumer behaviour and agile competitors has only intensified during the pandemic. Scalability will be more urgent in 2021, and yet the majority of organisations have struggled to expand their automation initiatives. The biggest barrier is process fragmentation, in which resources performing the work, including automation and digital resources, exist in silos.

Fragmented operations increase overhead costs and eat into the ROI on digital transformation investments. An open, integrated platform enables common governance and permits financial firms to scale rapidly.

As the pandemic wanes, firms need to reimagine customer journeys and rethink operations to improve customer and employee experiences. The successful ones will build upon their RPA capabilities and rely on intelligent automation digital workforce management to foster more agile and competitive ways of working and thinking so they can work like tomorrow—today.

Related Topics:digital worker financial firms Investment

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Finance

HIVERA BRINGS REGULATORY RISK SCORING TO FINANCIAL SERVICES

Financial services Chief Risk Officers and Heads of Compliance can now, for the first time ever, visualise and mitigate the regulatory risk in their entire unstructured data estate, thanks to hivera, a new regtech platform for financial services firms, designed to bring regulatory risk under control.

A new platform from data solutions provider, Automated-Intelligence, hivera enables clients to observe their unstructured data, assigning a tailored regulatory risk score based on the financial services firm’s risk appetite to that data, and automating the identification and remediation of threats to help mitigate associated risks.

Demonstrate Control
An estimated 80 percent of all data is unstructured. Until now, due to the challenges associated with discovering, analysing and managing unstructured data, this has created a significant challenge for compliance professionals, who are under increasing pressure from regulators to demonstrate compliance against policies and regulatory standards over all of their data.

hivera solves this problem. It indexes text-extractable content, providing users with advanced search capability to categorise personal information and commercially-sensitive data through metadata, security, keyword, phrases, and regular expression pattern matching.

Meanwhile, through the hivera dashboard, firms are presented with a risk score which correlates to the regulations they are subject to. In-depth insights enable them to visualise and address key compliance and regulatory risks within their data, whether retention related, security-related or a matter of personal and sensitive data. Moreover, with its user-friendly reporting modules, compliance professionals can quickly and easily provide compliance updates within the organisation or to regulators.

Automate Regulatory Risk Mitigation

In addition to significantly reducing regulatory risk and minimising human error, the hivera platform also offers huge resource, time and cost savings through automation. This is achieved through the application of fully-audited polices to categorised data, which enables ongoing data compliance and remediation. Policies applied against categorised data can perform deletions or archiving according to organisational retention schedules.

“hivera is transforming how financial services firms view unstructured data,” comments Simon Cole, CEO at Automated Intelligence. “By providing greater visibility and control over their unstructured data estate, we’re improving data analysis, data privacy, data protection and risk mitigation capabilities of our clients.”

Finance

FINANCIAL INCLUSION WITHIN DIGITAL PAYMENTS

NICK FISHER, GENERAL MANAGER, SALES AND MARKETING UK, JCB INTERNATIONAL (EUROPE) LTD.

The shift towards an economy that removes physical cash has long been on the horizon in many regions. Sweden is an example of a country rapidly heading this way. Two years ago, just 1% of Sweden’s GDP was circulating in cash compared to 11% in the Eurozone, and research by the Swedish Retail and Wholesale Council showed half of the nation’s retailers saying that they probably would not accept cash after 2025.

In 2019 in the UK, cash payments decreased by 15%, although physical money was still the second most frequently used method comprising of 23% of all payments. The Financial Inclusion Commission in the UK states that there are over 1 million people that do not have a bank account, and the World Bank estimates that there are some 1.7 billion adults globally that still lack access to a bank account.

The finance industry has collaborated over the years to develop various credit products for affluent communities. These customers are considered a lower risk. However, institutions should continue to prioritise the advancement of services to serve an audience which remains – ‘unbanked’. Research by EY showed that financial inclusion could improve GDP by up to 14% in more rural, developing economies like India, and by 30% in frontier markets like Kenya. While the positive reasons for fully embracing digital payments and eliminating physical cash are plentiful, including lower payment processing costs for the retailer and customer convenience, physical cash provides the ‘unbanked’ with the ability to function day-to-day with a legal tender.

To establish digital solutions for the unbanked, payment players should adopt an inclusive mindset. The race towards a digital cash society will naturally get closer to the finish line with the passing of each generation, but governments could lend a hand to the unbanked by encouraging financial institutions to sponsor organisations that provide legal quasi digital cash products. In my opinion, the financial industry has an important part to play in developing low cost solutions to support the unbanked with authentication tools – such as biometrics and risk tools to manage real-time credit risk reporting with anywhere accessibility.

In both developing and developed countries, QR codes can play a superhero role as they offer simple, low-cost ways of processing payments on basic mobile phones. In June last year, we collaborated with FIS to enable cross-border QR codes in the APAC region. The ‘Worldpay from FIS 2020 Global Payments Report’ found that digital wallets, at the time, accounted for 58 % of regional ecommerce purchases and were expected to reach almost 70 % percent by 2023.

In developed regions, we are issued with a formal identification when we are born, no matter our circumstances, and this comes in the form of a birth certificate or, later in life, a passport. This does not always happen in developing countries as resources are often limited. Yet, advances in biometric technologies, such as fingerprint or palm vein may offer a solution to the requirement for proof of identity to open a bank account or to create a mobile wallet. Biometric organisations, payment leaders and innovators, such as Google Pay and Apple Pay, have partnered to make this a reality, despite the initial cost implications for development.

In summary, understanding the reasons for why some prefer physical cash, and others prefer digital cash, provides holistic learnings to achieve a society that ultimately uses digital cash only. Empathy is paramount for building customer-centric commerce. For me, at least, a world without physical cash cannot be considered responsible, or fair, until everyone can be accommodated.