For bankers, fintech platforms aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. There are tons of them out there, all purporting to solve a ton of problems digitally.
But they don’t live up to the hype. Not if you’re working in your bank’s Deposit Operations group, and need to process new-account-opening applications submitted via these different fintech platforms.
Why? Despite all the whiz-bang technology and promises of centralization, fully 75 to 80 percent of account-opening applications arrive with information missing from them.
And so the supposedly automated platforms require a lot of manual intervention by humans: your bank’s already-overworked staffers.
But what if you could take that burden off of those people? We’re not talking about fixing the inherent shortcomings in the fintech platforms themselves. (That’s the fintechs’ job.) We’re talking about robotic process automation or RPA. In other words, it’s now possible to “park an RPA bot” atop these tedious fintech-induced chores at your bank, thanks to The Lab, North America’s undisputed banking-automation authority.
In this article, we’ll walk you through how one bank—an actual client of The Lab—accomplished this, and how their model can apply to your bank, too, regardless of the systems and platforms you use. That’s right: RPA bots from The Lab are platform- and fintech-agnostic.
We’ve even created a little two-minute video about it, which you can view right here:
The amount of fintech-fixing work out there is as big as the number of fintech platforms. Bots from The Lab can work with any of them, including:
The bank, and bot, in this example (and shown in the video) are using Q2 Gro. Here, new-account applications originate from any of three sources:
From there, the ones needing work fall into any of three different buckets:
For this bot, it’s looking specifically at the first two buckets: “Incomplete” and “Referred.” And it has a series of tasks to complete for each kind. This is the exact tedious work that your Deposit Ops staffers are doing—and hating—every day. It’s little wonder that turnover is so high at banks lately.
The bot begins by logging into the fintech portal, with its own username and password, just like a person would. From there, it performs a search, navigating its way to the queue for the “Incomplete” and “Referred” applications.
For the “Incomplete” applications, the bot is trained to look for certain obvious information: Social Security number, date of birth, and account number. If any are missing, it sends an email to the customer, directly from the account-opening system, requesting the missing information, and moves on to the next application in the queue… in less time than it takes you to read this sentence.
“Referred” applications (for online applications only) get a different robotic workflow. Here, the bot will not only validate the ID information, but it will also search the bank’s document-management system to see if that account holder has any charge-off’s or bankruptcies. The bank in the demo is using AEM as its document-management and imaging system, but bots from The Lab can use any, such as:
If, after looking up the customer’s information, a charge-off or bankruptcy is found, the bot sets the application status to “Fraud” and moves it to the “Complete” queue.
While the bot is working—searching the fintech app, accessing the document-management system, and sending emails—it’s also, in the background, working in Excel, too. It’s creating a list of everything it’s done. It creates and populates columns for:
That last column—“RPA Status”—is interesting. There, the bot writes in notes for its human “bosses,” such as: “No action taken,” or “Fraud – ID verification failed; declined email sent.”
And so after the bot blazes through each application in the queue, it emails its Excel sheet to the appropriate parties at the bank. Human intervention, in other words, is now only required where it’s truly required.
This one bot makes up for fintech shortcomings, while increasing compliance and reducing fraud. Not only that, it hedges against employee turnover by freeing up over 1,000 hours of tedious labor, every single year.
The best way to appreciate this speed and game-changing power is to see it for yourself. We invite you to schedule your free, no-obligation 30-minute screen-sharing demo with The Lab. You’ll see real RPA bots in action, see 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 bank against employee turnover. Eliminate errors and resulting losses. Simply call (201) 526-1200 or email info@thelabconsulting.com to book your demo today!
