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The banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industries are facing a talent crisis — driven by the pandemic, the Great Resignation, the aging workforce, the Russian-Ukraine War, and now an all-but-guaranteed global recession.
At an event hosted by Fortune and the World Economic Forum earlier this year, Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan said, “A lot of people left the labor market and they’re not going to come back, even with a strong bid for their services. And that’s just the reality we’re going to be facing. We’re going to be chasing that dynamic of not enough people working.”
The looming recession is adding to staffing challenges. According to a recent KPMG survey, the vast majority of U.S. CEOs (91%) are convinced we are heading toward a recession in the next 12 months, and only about a third of U.S. CEOs (34%) believe this recession will be mild and short. As a result, many organizations are hitting the brakes on hiring.
Intelligent Automation Puts Technology to Work
Regardless of the macroeconomic events slamming the labor markets, work still needs to get done. The top financial institutions are putting technology to work by using Intelligent Automation (IA) to create a digital workforce.
Unlike Robotic Process Automation (RPA) which follows rules to automate work that has no variation, Intelligent Automation is able to automate entire roles — such as, a transaction screening analyst who is an OFAC/AML expert, or a sanctions and adverse media screening expert who is a top expert in BSA requirements — not just task-driven jobs.
IA efficiently operationalizes machine learning as a superior alternative to rules-driven RPA. It integrates all RPA capabilities plus machine learning (including NLP), pre-built connectors, OCR, etc. that work together to automate end-to-end operational processes for learning and adapting to data in real time.
In the 2022 PeerPaper™ Report, WorkFusion customers have identified the five key success factors for why they are building a digital workforce.
5 Reasons Why BFSI Organizations Are Employing AI-Led Digital Workers
1. They’re Not Afraid of Complex Workflows
Unlike traditional RPA bots, AI-enabled Digital Workers perform full-scale roles, not just rote tasks. They’re trained at BFSI orgs like yours, so they’re ready to handle your complex processes on day one. According to a review from a Senior Engineer at Santander Bank, “WorkFusion has the capability to implement complex workflows, which is useful.”
Digital Workers give written explanations for their decisions. And if they’re unsure about a case, they escalate it to their real-world colleagues (and are more likely to handle a similar case on their own next time). Not only do they constantly learn from your documents and teams, but also each other and your industry peers via WorkFusion Network. Again, these are not your average RPA bots.
Speaking of complexity, with their Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) capabilities, Digital Workers read and understand long-form, unstructured documents — the ones your teams dread dealing with. As industry analyst firm Everest points out in a recent report, IDP solutions can be tough to implement. Read how our Digital Workers help you get there.
2. They Save Money
For highly regulated industries, the cost of doing business is full of risks and challenges even in stable times. With the chaos of recent global events, whether it’s the Covid-19 crisis, rollercoaster labor market, or looming recession, how can you achieve steady growth with so many moving targets?
A Vice President of Intelligent Automation at a tech services company with more than 5,000 employees says WorkFusion “helps in many ways, including lowering the cost of delivery. It helps us by either avoiding external costs or by reducing the cost of operations…”
Take, for example, significant employee-related costs due to historic talent shortages, decreasing loyalty, burnout, and the long ramp-up for new hires to become independent and productive. Even for fully staffed and trained teams, the evermore complex regulatory environment represents a chronic threat of costly human error while performing repetitive, time-consuming manual work. This is exactly where Digital Workers can save you money — and save the day.
3. They Relieve Employee Burnout
Employee burnout is no joke. It can easily lead to errors and, of course, quitting — both of which come with a hefty price tag. Unlike your traditional teams, Digital Workers don’t get tired of performing repetitive work. (Nor do they get sick or take vacation, for that matter!) Senior Vice President/KYC Director at a financial services firm with over 1,000 employees says, “Before WorkFusion, my processes were all manual. Now, the WorkFusion model reduces the amount of time my analysts have to spend reviewing client profiles that have been created against the documentation from the client.”
It’s like a snake eating its own tail. Your existing team gets overburdened. They can’t deal with the volume. Then volumes go up. They can’t deal with the new volume. People get burned out, they leave, there’s a brain drain. The remaining team is now even more overburdened. But volumes are still going up. Things naturally get missed. But Digital Workers allow your teams to go on with business as usual regardless of these events.
While Digital Workers free your teams from boring, repetitive work, we understand this can also represent a threat to your employees’ job security. If you’re struggling with how to help your employees embrace automation, we highly recommend reading Gartner’s comprehensive, clear, honest guide on how to help mitigate employees’ fear of automation.
4. They Support Compliance
With an increasingly complex and demanding regulatory landscape, FIs can rest easy knowing Digital Workers like Evelyn (Sanctions and Adverse Media Screening Analyst), Tara (Transaction Screening Analyst), and Darryl (Customer Due Diligence program Analyst) are working 24/7 to find the true threats to your organization and weed out noise in a tiny fraction of the time it would take your teams.
“With the WorkFusion model,” the SVP/KYC Director writes, “we reduce human error and the need for further QC. We switch more to a QA process where we’re testing whether the model is effective.”
For another customer, a large financial services firm with $1 trillion in AUM, growth led to an increasing compliance burden. But, they smartly avoided increasing headcount by hiring Digital Workers Evelyn and Darryl. Evelyn processes ~15,000 adverse media searches, which previously took 20 minutes each. And Darryl processes ~45,000 Trust Agreements and Articles of Incorporation per year, which previously took 7 minutes per document across 5 systems and took a human worker 100 clicks.
5. They Boost Overall Efficiency
With proven results saving both time and money, our AI-enabled Digital Workers are your Swiss army knife: enabling you to achieve holistic efficiency gains across your organization and freeing your team to handle nuanced, high-risk cases where their value really shines.
“The benefit to our organization will really be the overall efficiency. It’s reducing the human processing time, which reduces costs and increases our speed to market,” says a Senior Vice President/KYC Director in his review. “WorkFusion has doubled our efficiency,” says a Senior Product Manager at a financial services firm. “We can process double the amount of work with the same people.”
For more intel from our customers and why they employ Digital Workers, read the full PeerSpot PeerPaper™ Report. Plus, download our book of case studies, “Digital Workers in Action for Banking & Financial Services,” for even more success stories and real results.
Want to discover how our Digital Workers can transform your operations? Request a demo.
