By Pol Brouckaert, Director at Netcall Europe
The last twenty-five years have seen banks and insurers invest significantly in the digitisation of their customer channels. This started with static information websites around the turn of the century, mobile apps with the introduction of the smartphone 15 years ago and finally, the widespread adoption of chatbots over the last five years.
In the connected and digital world that we live in, the demand for faster, smoother, technology-enabled experiences has driven this digital acceleration. Front-end services have been prioritised to keep up, whilst reliance on brick-and-mortar channels has significantly declined. For example, in the EU, approximately 100,000 bank branches have closed in the last 15 years[1].
Whilst transforming customer-facing processes is one piece of the customer experience puzzle, all workflows impacting the customer require optimisation. For example, whilst tasks such as applying for a loan can now be initiated online, processing these requests still often involves manual work in the background. Whether it’s AML or KYC checks, pulling relevant information from supporting documents to support a claim, or verifying financial details to determine loan eligibility.
For too long, these time-consuming back-end processes have been left behind on the transformation journey, yet it is these document and data-intensive tasks that have the potential to introduce delays and friction for the customer. Not to mention, their potential to introduce unnecessary costs, inefficiency and backlogs internally. For example, for small claims, the cost of processing it manually can sometimes be higher than the claim amount itself.
Now is the time to bridge the transformation gap and bring these back-end processes into the digital age. By doing so, financial service organisations can offer customers the real-time experience they seek whilst drastically reducing back-office costs.
Saving you (and your customers) time
When introduced correctly, technologies such as intelligent document processing (IDP) and RPA can automate back-end processes such as claims and loan processing, removing the need for manual data extraction and keying data into downstream systems. Instead, by utilising AI, these tools can accurately extract data from a variety of documents – and populate it into an easy-to-interpret interface. This means – if an insurance claim is submitted on a Friday, instead of being added to a queue to be reviewed by a human worker on a Monday, the documents can be checked in real-time. If anything is missing, customers can be notified right away, even on the weekend. Additionally, in the case of applying for loans, if the customer has already been pre-approved and previously passed internal checks, they can get an instant response about their loan approval. Depending on the exact use case, we have witnessed Straight-Through-Processing rates of 80% and above achieved with IDP systems, with a human-in-the-loop required on less than 20% of the most complex and/or ambiguous cases.
Essentially, when processes are automated, bottlenecks are removed and lead times are shortened, meaning that customers can receive faster responses. This results in higher customer satisfaction as service delivery becomes more efficient, streamlined, and consistent.
Easing the burden internally
Whilst customer satisfaction is crucial, the automation of back-end processes can also positively impact employee morale. Automating the repetitive and often tedious back-end tasks associated with document processing means that employees can be freed up to focus on more interesting and impactful work. For financial service organisations dealing with thousands of documents every week, removing the need for manual email routing and data entry allows workers to engage in higher-value decision-making or customer interaction, boosting job satisfaction and engagement. Peaks and troughs in workload also become much more manageable, rather than having to add additional staff for peak season and/or at times heavily stretch existing staff. When employees no longer have to perform monotonous tasks, they are likely to feel more valued and motivated, and more productive as a result. With workloads spiralling across most industries, empowering employees in their roles has never been more important and AI-driven automation is already having a huge impact.
An automated future
The case for introducing automation into back-end processes is evident. This is further bolstered when integrated intelligently and aligned with other AI-driven capabilities across the business. By taking a platform approach, organisations in the financial services sector can begin to transform and connect with other systems. By doing so, they can achieve end-to-end integration with unified workflows that power better customer and user experience, improve efficiency, and save money.
With the availability of IDP solutions today, it has never been easier to digitise end-to-end processes. Where adding a new document type took several days or weeks with the previous generation of AI (supervised learning from a dataset with thousands of labelled examples), with a novel Large Language Model-based approach this can now be achieved in as little as 30 minutes.
In the UK 75% of firms are already using AI, and a further 10% are planning to use it over the next three years[2]. To continue to thrive in the digital age, these organisations need to consider where the true benefits of AI really lie. It is clear technology has played an important part in front-end customisation and personalisation of services, but back-end mundane processes should not be forgotten. These areas stand to benefit significantly from the introduction of AI and automation and will be key to setting financial service organisations apart both now and in the future.
References:
1 EU: number of bank branches 1999-2023 | Statista)
2 https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/report/2024/artificial-intelligence-in-uk-financial-services-2024
