Investment bank

The challenge

To remain compliant with regulations in the financial services industry, an investment bank is required to create a total capital ratio report after every trading day. Until recently, this was a manual process that took a highly skilled employee four or more hours each day.

• First, employees had to wait until all the transaction data from the day’s trading was available, which delayed their ability to begin working on the report until the evening. Data becomes available at different times each day, which means that employees might start compiling the report at 4 p.m. some days and at 8 p.m. on others.
• Employees then downloaded the compiled data and exported it to a spreadsheet. Since the data includes several hundred thousand transactions, it might take 45 minutes to export, and the export process had to be monitored by an employee the entire time to prevent further delays.
• Once available in the spreadsheet, employees checked, integrated and finalized the data, which occasionally required them to access other back-office systems. Although some of the data integration and calculation was already automated through macros, employees still had to perform a large number of copy and paste actions.
• Finally, employees generated a report and emailed it to the bank’s CFO.

This manual process took between one and four hours and created numerous problems, including:

• Unpredictable processing times
• Human error during manual review of export processing leading to reporting delays
• Human error from necessary manual copy and paste editing of data
• Negative impact on employees’ quality of life, requiring repetitive work through the evening each day

To help overcome these challenges, the investment bank adopted a Hyland RPA solution.

The solution

With Hyland RPA, or robotic process automation, the financial institution now has access to a comprehensive RPA suite, from process analysis to bot management. Hyland RPA seamlessly integrated into the bank’s back office program landscape. It now completes the regulatory report each day in minutes, while also nearly eliminating any possibility of human error.

RPA is an ideal solution for business processes that require human intervention because it replicates many of the activities done by human workers. For example, data entry, data validation and ticket routing can all be completed by software robots. When RPA is combined with a product that intelligently captures paper-based data and converts it to structured data, the entire data intake process can be automated.

At the bank, employees now initiate the new automated reporting process with an email indicating that all data is available. Hyland RPA then triggers an automated process that seamlessly compiles the data and report. The robot navigates the complex user interface of the bank’s back-office software via image recognition. A SOAP API service validates the data and further reduces the error rate. The solution tracks the process continuously, automatically informing the correct contact person if any problems occur, such as missing data records or transaction errors.

At the end of a process run, the RPA solution sends a summary to an employee, who approves the reporting. Hyland RPA then forwards the full report to the bank’s CFO.

Benefits

With Hyland RPA, the bank saves highly qualified resources up to four hours per day, or up to 0.4 FTEs. This enables skilled employees to focus on other more rewarding tasks. RPA has also dramatically improved employees’ quality of life, as their evenings are no longer tied up in a repetitive, manual process. Personnel bottlenecks were removed with the freed-up resources, and the financial institution is now set up to apply the same approach to other back-office administrative tasks.