As banks and financial institutions (FIs) navigate rapidly shifting customer preferences, the imperative to transform is urgent.
It’s not as if banks aren’t trying. Some have made significant strides in addressing customer experience (CX) and operational efficiency by investing in mobility, cloud, automation, and enterprise integration. However, fragmented systems and processes continue to stall their progress.
Banks and FIs need to transform their complex operations by prioritizing five critical factors:
1. Deliver 100% digital onboarding for seamless CX.
Customers expect an easy omnichannel onboarding experience with zero manual intervention. Banks need to offer a smooth, hassle-free know-your-customer (KYC) process with minimal data entry and to integrate their digital interfaces with automated back-office operations.
2. Simplify and transform complex lending operations.
Lending is inherently complex and resource intensive. Whether in retail or commercial lending, every customer’s situation is unique, calling for its own set of documentation to establish creditworthiness. Consequently, traditional loan origination and underwriting are bottlenecks to digital experience. Banks must automate manual, paper-driven processes to simplify and streamline complex lending operations.
3. Modernize distributed trade finance operations.
Trade financing is complex due to the state of banking operations and ecosystems. The distributed nature of trade financing processes, dependent on paper trails and timely integrations, makes the transformation of trade finance a formidable undertaking. Banks must find ways to automate and integrate all aspects of trade financing.
4. Automate and integrate for smooth customer journeys across products.
Many banks use mobile apps and web portals to consolidate their products and services, but a single interface often doesn’t translate to a consistent experience across products, due to fragmented back-office operations. Banks must create a process backbone that can offer to customers, employees, and partners a consistent experience across products and services.
5. Address compliance and sustainability.
Given the dynamic, fast-paced nature of the banking environment, it is challenging to keep up with regulatory and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) requirements if a bank’s underlying operations do not support them by design. Banks must look for ways to integrate compliance and regulatory requirements in their operational fabric so they can focus on delivering value.
How Can Banks Do It All?
As the old adage goes, “If it were simple, everyone would be doing it already.”
Business and technology leaders in banks and FIs have had their eyes on these digital transformation priorities. However, a robust strategy around reliable, all-encompassing solutions is often elusive.
Banks must automate end to end at enterprise scale. And they must look for a solution that enables them to do it fast.
That calls for a platform-driven strategy that unifies five automation capabilities to deliver an end-to-end digital customer journey:
1. Intelligent Process Automation
A robust process automation engine automates and integrates workflows, business rules, knowledge worker tasks, robotic tasks, and various applications and backend systems to provide straight-through processing (STP) as well as omnichannel experience and operational visibility. It enables a 100% digital customer journey by acting as the backbone for all digital interfaces and forms the integration hub that lets banks act as a connected enterprise.
2. Contextual Content Services
Banking operations depend on documents and unstructured content: pictures, videos, messages, emails. Content automation streamlines processing of all types of content to enable secure real-time access to stakeholders. It enables digital KYC through automated ingestion, processing, and verification of incoming identity documents through intelligent document processing (IDP). IDP automates the processing of lending collaterals and trade finance instruments for real-time decisions. Content automation also enables adherence to compliance and ESG requirements by ensuring end-to-end life cycle management of all incoming content, from ingestion to storage and archiving.
3. Omnichannel Customer Engagement
Banks communicate to customers and partners all the time. However, the timing, relevance, level of personalization, and content of communication determine whether their customers and partners engage. Banks must integrate centralized and automated communication management into their operations to deliver the right message through the right channel at the right time. Omnichannel customer engagement enables that and lets banks manage all communications centrally and efficiently.
4. AI and Data Science
All banking operations—whether onboarding, lending, trade finance, or customer service—can use artificial intelligence (AI) with process, content, and communication automation. Using AI, banks can automate several aspects of their operations—loan application validation, underwriting, credit checks, trade instrument verification, spreading, and personalization of cross-sell offers—to deliver 100% digital journeys. Integrating AI into automation technologies enables hyper-personalization and real-time digital outcomes.
5. Low Code for Speed and Automation at Scale
Banks cannot afford to spend months or years trying to establish automation in their operations. A native low-code capability enables development and deployment of all types of applications with speed through composition. It also facilitates proliferation of automation technologies across the bank without loss of time and synergy, which boosts consistency of experience across the organization.
The Newgen low-code platform can help banks develop business applications in only weeks from ideation to deployment instead of months or years.
Simplify Banking Complexity
Banks cannot entirely do away with complexity of their operations, but they can use end-to-end automation to unlock simplicity for consistently great CX. With a platform that unifies automation technologies across process, content, communication, and AI, banks can achieve end-to-end automation at enterprise scale.
Which means they can:
• Automate digital banking journeys, such as onboarding, loan origination, trade financing, and customer service, to deliver great CX
• Streamline the flow of information across front, middle, and back offices
• Integrate internally as well as externally to create a connected banking ecosystem for customers, employees, and partners
• Achieve strategic agility to unlock simplicity and innovate with new business models
The impact of process automation is real. One large private bank reduced the process of initiating a loan from a typical 60 minutes to less than 10 minutes by using Newgen’s platform. It has also dramatically sped up the underwriting process, from 100 minutes to 30 minutes, and it used end-to-end automation to reduce the time of closures of loans to under a day.
Another large bank automated its trade finance end-to-end with Newgen to reduce turnaround time by as much as 52%, handling more than 10,000 transactions a day. The bank automated trade financing across trade instruments—bank guarantees, standby letters of credit, import and export documents, trade credits, inland documents, supply-chain financing—that spread across 4,000 branches nationwide.
Banks can transform their complex operations even if they face the challenges of technical debt and fragmented infrastructure. All they need is a robust end-to-end automation strategy and a platform that can support it.
Learn how Newgen can help your organization deliver digital journeys in banking.
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Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : Harvard Business – https://hbr.org/sponsored/2024/03/how-an-automation-platform-can-help-banks-streamline-digital-customer-journeys
