Three things financial institutions should automate now

Speed up the pace of automation

Banks, credit unions, and financial institutions of all types and sizes are in an innovation race. Recent events with COVID-19 have highlighted some areas of opportunity where organizations can use automation to make big efficiency improvements. This has put a lot of pressure on CIOs, CTOs, and their IT departments to find highly effective solutions that bring a big ROI.

To help deliver that ROI, here are three areas financial institutions should focus their automation efforts to bring immediate value:

• Optimize your ACH processing time
• Utilize your WLA platform to achieve RPA victories
• Automate your loan origination process

There are a few metrics that contribute to defining automation ROI.

A technology solution should:

• Save workhours
• Reduce errors
• Speed up key processes
• Increase resilience
• Enhance security

How to optimize and speed up your ACH processing time with automation

The move to same day ACH was great for consumers but challenging for financial institutions. Every institution that offers debit cards must process those transactions by the next business day, which means processing ACH twice per day. This doubles the work for operations staff responsible for pulling the file from the fed, processing the transactions, editing entries as needed, and then posting the return file.

Most companies already had some kind of batch processing software to handle their ACH processing. What they find themselves running into now is a dual problem: lack of speed and lack of flexibility in their batch processor. The common workaround was to simply put the burden on staff to either stay late or log in remotely from home to manually authorize different steps in the process or fix errors. This is not an efficient way to use workhours, with the additional detriment of making staff responsible for work tasks during their non-work time.

Clients using OpCon, our finance automation solution, have eliminated most of these manual processes and freed up enough workhours to finish their twice daily ACH processing without having to stay late.

Pretty cool, yeah? You can read more details about the process we use to help financial clients with their ACH processing here.

How to use your business process automation platform to achieve RPA functionality

Robotic Process Automation is a phrase that evokes grand promises of amazing automation. In many situations it can deliver exactly that. However, it’s also oversold as a solution to challenges it isn’t efficient at addressing.

RPA is truly amazing at handling very simple automation and has some great out of the box functionality. It can automate a lot of repetitive, simple tasks that eat up end-user workhours, such as mass data-entry and auto-formatting documents. If you have 1,000 end-users who have roughly the same responsibilities for entering customer data and requests, RPA works like a charm. But…its scalability is very siloed. Configuring different bots to meet the diverse needs of users quickly introduces a high level of complexity and maintenance that spikes the cost of the solution upwards.

If you have left the batch-processor behind for a workload automation platform, or are looking to do that soon, you might already have a workable solution to meet several of your RPA goals. If your WLA platform has a programmable Self Service interface, you can give end-users access to execute complex workflows safely. You will need someone who can program the scripts and API calls necessary to make it work, but that’s also a requirement for complex RPA solutions.

WLA is a bigger investment up front than many RPA solutions, but for complex automation solutions, particularly involving servers and datacenters, it is typically more cost efficient and robust.

Want to dive deeper? We’ve got a blog that talks more about the automation solutions that WLA can provide for your organization.

Add more automation to your loan origination process

Loan origination is a long process with a lot of potential roadblocks. Here are some of the ways we can help you automate to create better outcomes for customers and for your business:

• Pre-qualification phase — route application according to criteria
• Loan application phase — notify relevant rep to review
• Application phase — flag applications with missing fields and route to reviewer
• Underwriting phase — pass application to scoring and analysis program
• Credit decision phase — retrieve application from underwriting step and pass to QA
• QA phase — notify applicant of approval or disapproval and initiate loan funding
• Loan funding phase — track funding and execution of all necessary documents

Handling your multi-step approval processes is easy to do with the right automation solution. When you break it down to individual steps, it’s a series of notification triggers, routing protocols, and enabling push-button workflows. It makes it easy for the humans in the process to quickly make decisions with minimal errors, speeding up your operations.

We have a blog with more details on how OpCon, our finance automation platform, can help your organization speed up your loan origination process while reducing mistakes.

Other high value tasks your organization can automate

WLA platforms like OpCon are much more capable than many people realize. Here are a few of the many tasks that you can automate:

• Cash disbursement
• Revenue management
• General operations
• File transfers
• Reports
• Onboarding
• Offboarding
• Docker container management
• Disaster Recovery testing
• Etc.

Our team has helped hundreds of companies in the financial industry, from small credit unions to large datacenter providers. Contact us to see how we can help your company grow.