Your bank’s customers never appreciate all the work that goes on, behind the scenes, whenever they submit a request to wire money to another party in the U.S.
But you sure do. This is one tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone back-office operation that your team, well, despises. It reduces your highly trained (and highly paid) workers to mere “human glue,” manually processing information among lots of disparate systems that don’t to each other.
Before we get into the drudge-work itself (not to mention the ingenious solution to the problem), let’s consider some of the uncomfortable facts about processing outbound wires and ACH requests:
Why are outbound wires and ACH transfers so difficult and time-consuming? The answer lies in the process itself.
In a typical setup, back-office workers in Treasury Management will need to be on the lookout for incoming wire and ACH requests. These can take many forms; they might be emails from the branches, the website, or phoned in to the call center.
And once they receive a request, the manual processing might go something like this, depending on the systems your bank uses. The worker must:
We’d mentioned “depending on the systems your bank uses.” This refers to not only the core, but the ancillary systems, too. Among the systems and vendors employed for processing this single transaction, you might be using:
The Lab is able to automate this entire laborious process for banks, using robotic process automation or RPA.
We’ve made a little two-minute video which shows it in action; check it out:
The clever thing about this RPA bot setup is that it takes advantage of the bots’ relative strengths vs. humans.
You can already guess what most of those strengths are. Bots are infinitely faster. They never get tired or take breaks. And they don’t make mistakes. While exciting, that’s not exactly surprising.
But here’s what you might not have considered: A single bot can “remember” as much information, at a single shot, as you care to throw its way. People can’t do this. And this is why people are forced to process ACH wire transfers one at a time. Each transfer involves lots of different numbers—such as type, address, sender reference ID, and transaction amount—and so each transfer is a process unto itself.
But a bot has an unlimited memory. Here’s how The Lab was able to take advantage of that, well, advantage…
In this example setup, the RPA bot monitors Q2 for wire-request notifications in an email in-box, where it filters the inbound requests for sender reference number and transfer amount. It then memorizes them all, all at once! A human could only do one at a time, but the bot doesn’t care. It memorizes the entire list, and every relevant number within it—in just seconds!
From there, the process is pretty straightforward, as the bot mimics what a human would do. It next logs in to FIS eWire, navigates to the transactions table, checks the entries against Fedwire, verifying for type, address, sender reference ID, and transaction amount—without ever going back to that in-box!
And while this example uses FIS, the same bot can do this for Fiserv and Jack Henry wire transfer platforms.
Finally, the bot updates the transaction log in Excel, reporting its results.
As we’d mentioned above, a human worker takes about ten minutes to process a single domestic outbound wire or ACH request. The bot, on the other hand, does the same thing in just 25 seconds. That’s 20 times faster. And while humans inadvertently return about a ten-percent error rate, the bot’s error rate is zero.
Remember: This single transaction is currently costing your bank anywhere from 2,000 to 25,000 hours per year!
Here’s the best part: The bots described above were built by The Lab remotely from our U.S. offices in Houston, with nothing outsourced or offshored. And we can build this wire-transfer/ACH bot for you in less than a week.
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!
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.
