For every bank with an ATM network—and that’s all of them—there’s the daily chore of reconciling the transactions across its constellation of automated teller machines.
You—or, more specifically, lots of smart people in your back office or Deposit Ops—need to reconcile lots of numbers. “Reconcile” is just a fancy word for “seeing if they match.”
But none of this is simple. To the contrary, it’s exceedingly difficult, tedious, laborious, and prone to errors. Consider some of the steps:
And make no mistake: Your bank’s staffers absolutely hate doing this work. It’s not even a question. It’s like being trapped in a circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.
When you think about all of the different systems that these workers must touch in the course of their reconciling day, you might think it’s impossible to tie them all together and automate them. After all, that’s why the people are there in the first place: The systems don’t talk to each other. Even different modules from the exact same core provider! Thus the required “human glue.”
But robotic process automation, or RPA, from The Lab, changes all that. Think of an RPA bot as a very simple “person” who can “sit at a computer” and do all of those exact same tedious things that a human worker does every day. The bot can log into systems, with its own login and password. It can navigate portals and apps. It can filter for given date-ranges. It can select the data it gets. And then it can copy and paste it into to other applications, such as Excel, where it can manipulate it (including, for example, eliminating duplicate entries), and save its output onto a shared drive, even giving it a rational, custom filename. Other bots can even step in to email the output to the right people!
We’ll get to even more of the bot benefits in a minute. But first, let’s address a question that’s surely on your mind by now:
“How can this possibly work for our core system and our way of doing daily ATM network recons?”
That’s a great question. Let’s answer it for you.
Different banks have different ways of reconciling their ATM network data each day. On top of that, they employ different core systems, such as those from FIS, Fiserv, or Jack Henry. To which The Lab says, “No problem!”
That’s one of the great things about RPA bots. They’re core-system agnostic. Remember: If a person can click their way into FIS or Fiserv, so can a robot.
To illustrate just how seamlessly The Lab can do this for your bank, we’ve made a little video about it. It shows the exact same ATM network recon, being performed on three different core systems, at three different banks. Here it is; watch it for yourself:
The FIS-based bot suite works like this.
And we say “bot suite,” because, typically, there will be a few bots, working together as a “team,” handing off work from one to another, almost like a relay race.
For the FIS-based ATM recons, it starts with the first bot, which:
Now Bot Number 2 steps in:
Finally, the third bot picks up the task, and emails the report to a pre-determined list of human recipients.
There. Done. Impressive, huh?
Even more impressive: This one bot suite saves 500 hours of labor annually. That’s worth more than $18,000 of labor in a bank, year after year!
Same task—ATM network recons—but a totally different setup: Fiserv Signature and Nautilus, with a Lawson ERP (enterprise resource planning) used as a general ledger or GL. Yet bots from The Lab handle it with equal aplomb:
The bots extract all the data they need from Lawson. Next, they log in and grabs the corresponding data from Fiserv Nautilus, and reconcile the Balancing Recap Report against the GL, line-by-line—just like the deposit-operations worker would.
Want to see how it works for Jack Henry setup? The steps go something like this:
So far, we’ve said that bots can do everything that people do. They do it faster. They don’t take breaks, get tired, or make mistakes.
But there are also things which bots—such as these ATM network-reconciliation bots—can do, which people won’t, can’t, or don’t want to do:
As we’d hinted above, ATM-reconciliation bots from The Lab are a case study in ROI. Consider the numbers:
It’s one thing to read about RPA for ATM-network reconciliations. It’s another thing, entirely, to see it in action, in a real, live demo. So get one! The Lab invites you to schedule your own, no-obligation 30-minute screen-share demo, in which we’ll show you all this power at work, and answer any questions you may have. (We have more than 800 banking bots, ready-to-deploy!) Simply call (201) 526-1200 or email info@thelabconsulting.com to book your demo today!
For 2021: We have updated our bank client offering. Much of these findings and implementation results can be reviewed in the 3-part-series of “Big Rocks for Banks” below. Find out how to strategically lower costs, increase operating leverage, improve customer experience, and automate what previously wasn’t automatable in your bank.
