Building End-to-End Automation: A Quick-Start Guide

For financial institutions (FIs), automation has long been dominated by the back office. IT and operations are by far the most heavily automated business functions while processes in departments like customer service, HR, and procurement remain comparatively manual.

Meanwhile, banks and credit unions report top strategic objectives like growing deposits, fraud detection, digital banking, and data analytics, and FIs want to increase automation across their operations by an average of 20%.

So, to achieve their desired level of automation and reach their high-level business goals, banks and credit unions must think beyond the back office and embrace end-to-end automation. But how?

We’ll provide an actionable set of steps for leveraging different types of automation solutions at the right time within a workflow, plus real-world use cases for end-to-end automation—but first, let’s define end-to-end automation.

What does end-to-end automation mean?

End-to-end automation can mean automating an entire process from start to finish—even as it moves between multiple systems and departments. Alternatively, it can mean automating the portions of a workflow that involve a specific department.

The definition of end-to-end automation changes depending on your organization’s definition of the ideal state for a given process. Regardless of precisely where you place your endpoints, the goal of end-to-end automation is to close any manual gaps that exist between them.

Once you’ve established what end-to-end automation means for your institution, you can begin building it.

The building blocks of end-to-end automation: BPA, RPA, WLA, and beyond

The landscape of modern business automation solutions is constantly evolving, rife with acronyms and buzzwords.

In simple terms, banks and credit unions can build end-to-end automation strategies with tools that fall into one of four categories:

• Front End: Often leveraged by business users like tellers or lending and accounting team members, front-end automation tools include business process automation (BPA) and robotic process automation (RPA).
• Back End: Typically deployed to support batch processing, file movement, and complex scheduling, back-end automation solutions include technologies like workload automation (WLA) and service orchestration and automation platforms (SOAP).
• Data: Extract/transform/load (ETL) solutions manipulate data into the required forms.
• Integration: Serving as the central hub between many different and disjointed applications, integration tools like integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solutions are designed to take real-time action based on pre-defined triggers.

With an understanding of end-to-end automation and a general grasp of the building blocks available, the next step is to uncover when to use which type of automation solution.

The automation order of operations

Even with a simplified view of the automation landscape and a clear understanding of the process you want to automate, it can be difficult to uncover which solution is the best fit—particularly when your workflow might be best served by two (or even three) different types of automation working in tandem.

To ensure you don’t leave any manual gaps, follow this three-step automation order of operations:

Step 1: Start with APIs

To maximize efficiency and effectiveness, first look for opportunities to connect the systems involved in a process via APIs, select from a drop-down to listen for a trigger, and take immediate action based on that trigger (using an iPaaS solution).

For this step to apply, your process must be event-based and involve data that moves quickly. For steps where these criteria don’t fit or if API capabilities aren’t available (perhaps due to legacy platform limitations), move on to step two.

Step 2: Lean on batch processing

If there is a file or export you can access as part of the process and if the data needs to move in batches at predefined intervals (for example, every day, every week, or every hour), then implementing a WLA solution is an ideal next step.

For any manual gaps left in a workflow after implementing steps one and two, proceed to step three.

Step 3: Replicate human interactions

In some cases, there’s simply no way to leverage APIs or batch processing. For example, some vendor portals require FIs to manually upload files by logging in through a browser and dropping the file to the site. In these instances, RPA is ideal for taking automation the last mile.

By recording and replicating human clicks and keystrokes, RPA solutions save human staff from having to dedicate countless hours to simple manual tasks.

Building this muscle allows you to examine processes more holistically, identify unnecessary gaps, and deploy solutions where they best fit.

Real-world use cases for end-to-end automation

Even as FIs pursue strategic objectives that require greater enterprise-wide alignment, the struggle to think beyond the back office is evidenced by their automation investments. Across financial services organizations, WLA and basic job schedulers are the popular automation tools, used by 56% and 49% of FIs respectively.

To inspire creativity and illustrate how automation can both transcend IT and span multiple solutions, we’ll explore six real-world use cases for end-to-end automation.

Core record maintenance

By using RPA and WLA solutions together, banks and credit unions can perform account maintenance inside the core. This is achieved by:

• Using WLA to run a SQL query, returning results as a CSV, and exporting those records with IDs.
• Using RPA to open the records in Excel and adding further data pulled from another CSV via a search, find, copy loop command.
• Uploading the results with WLA.

Loan creation process

Outside of the core, WLA and RPA can drive efficiencies in the loan creation process when used collaboratively. FIs can do this by:

• Downloading files from the lending solution using WLA.
• Properly formatting the CSV using a PowerShell script.
• Mining the data using a search, find, copy RPA loop command.
• Returning the updated files to the lending tool with WLA.

Compliance documents

Though compliance remains top of mind for many financial institutions, it often involves tedious manual processes that are better served by automation solutions. For example, WLA and RPA can work together to streamline compliance efforts by:

• Retrieving files with WLA.
• Applying a watermark to relevant files with RPA.
• Moving files to final folders with WLA.
  

Get bond redemption files

A process best supported by three solutions—iPaaS, RPA, and WLA—banks and credit unions can automate processes surrounding bond redemption files by:

• Using an API call to retrieve files.
• Updating bond returns anywhere yields must be documented with RPA.
• Saving these results to the core system with WLA.
  

Fraud detection

As banks and credit unions seek novel ways to mitigate risk without sending costs through the roof, iPaaS and WLA present a low-cost option for effective fraud detection. FIs can leverage these solutions by:

• Monitoring the card services application with iPaaS via API connection and triggering real-time updates/notifications when fraud is detected on a card.
• Using either iPaaS or WLA, automatically initiate a job that places a hold on the card.
• Processing the necessary paperwork and reports with WLA.
  

Instant interest rate updates

When interest rates change, there’s an inevitable ripple effect that often translates to manual work. Alternatively, FIs can deploy end-to-end automation by:

• Monitoring a webpage for changes and scraping it when updates are made using an iPaaS solution, ultimately triggering a WLA job.
• Completing the necessary updates as a batch process with WLA.
• Updating any remaining applications or files with RPA.

Accelerating growth with end-to-end automation

Whether your organization’s top strategic goals are to improve member or customer experience, grow loans and deposits, enhance digital banking, mitigate risk, or unlock greater value from digital analytics, there’s no question that it’s time to think bigger when it comes to automation.

For a deeper dive into building end-to-end automation, watch our on-demand webinar and find helpful tips for bringing automation to departments outside of IT with our interdepartmental automation collaboration guide.