Regional bank saves 400 to 4,600 hours per year with RPA banking bots

Fintech platforms sure promise a lot: Plenty of new-account applications, served on a platter, to your bank.

The reality isn’t quite so exciting. Sure, the fintech platforms can give you a lot of applications, but they don’t do anything about all of the applications that get declined.

That’s on you. Or, more specifically, on your overworked staff. What are commonly known as “rejection notes” are actually “adverse-action letters” that must be created as an essential part of the audit trail.

We’ll tell you how many of these the average regional bank must process every day, in just a minute. But for now, think about this:

Every minute that your staff spends on these represents time away from customer service… used instead to process dead-on-arrival applications from those fintech platforms.

If that’s not a soul-sucking waste of time and energy—or ideal candidate for automation in your bank—then nothing is.

Fortunately, this chore can be automated, thus plugging all of those pesky fintech hype/reality gaps. It’s possible with robotic process automation (RPA) bots from The Lab, North America’s undisputed banking-automation authority.

In this article, we’ll walk you through an actual adverse-action bot we recently created for a leading regional bank. We’ve even created a little two-minute video of the bot, which you can view right here:

Before we dive into the details, we want to make something crystal clear: RPA banking bots from The Lab can work with any fintech platform. So your bank might be using Q2, MeridianLink, nCino, MANTL, FICO, newgen, and/or any others.

The bots don’t care. Similarly, they can use Excel, Outlook, and Word, and dive into your core (any core) and peripheral systems (any peripheral systems), just like a person would. In fact, bots are even set up with their own login and password for the chores they need to complete.

Unfortunately, a lot of applications that arrive at your bank’s “doorstep” from the various fintech platforms are D.O.A., or dead on arrival. This dictates the bot’s first chore: Finding them.

As you can see in the video, the bot logs in to the fintech platform, where it filters for the desired date-range, and even selects the proper pull-down to find the declined applications.

Then the work begins. Remember: This is work that your staffers are performing—and dreading—right this very minute.

From the “Declined” list, the bot drills down to the first declined application. In the resulting screen, it extracts all of the information it will need to create the letter. This includes items such as application date, applicant name, tax ID, and more.

Then it searches to see if there’s a consumer and credit-reporting agency report on file for that declined application. If it finds one, it opens it, and then extracts more data, including the score. And it saves the report, as a PDF, to the appropriate shared drive.

Just like a person would, the bot then switches to Word. It opens a template (replete with the bank’s logo at the top) and—and here’s the amazing part—populates it exactly as needed, based on that specific applicant’s information, credit report, and score. It checks all of the audit-trail boxes, such as providing the name and contact information of the credit agency, the score, and so on.

The bot then emails the customized letter directly to the applicant. And it saves a new PDF, which combines both the letter and the report, to the shared drive.

As if this weren’t enough “work” for the bot (that’s really a relative term, since bots don’t get tired or take breaks), it also creates an Excel report, detailing each application it processed and the actions it took. It then emails this Excel report directly to the team.

As we’d noted above, this is currently a ton of work for your bank’s staff, which can be especially precarious amid a tight talent market.

At the bank in this example, each letter takes seven to ten minutes to create. The bank must create 90 of these, every day.

With the bot, life has changed. That’s because it saves 4,600 hours of labor, every single year.

Banking executives are turning to The Lab to accelerate automation/AI readiness, lay the groundwork for strategic end-to-end process/product innovation, and implement Robotic Process Automation (RPA) “bots” to automate dozens of processes. With as few as three RPA bots from The Lab, you, too, can begin implementing on your company-wide strategic innovation roadmap—and start seeing hard-dollar benefits within weeks.

The best way to appreciate the speed and game-changing power of the automation suites installed by The Lab is to see it for yourself. Schedule a free, no-obligation 30-minute screen-sharing demo with The Lab, and you’ll see RPA bots in action. You’ll learn how we do all this from our U.S. offices in Houston, with nothing outsourced or offshored, and get all your questions answered by our friendly experts. Hedge your company against employee turnover, eliminate errors, and put your organization on a roadmap to accelerate your automation and AI initiatives. Simply call (201) 526-1200 or email info@thelabconsulting.com to book your demo today!