Preventing Avoidable Errors: How Financial Institutions Can Protect Their Reputation and Preserve Account Holder Trust

Financial institutions are built on a foundation of trust.

In today’s fast-paced and uber-competitive financial environment, even routine errors—such as missed deadlines, incorrect transactions, or compliance lapses—can damage an institution’s pristine reputation and erode years of hard-won accountholder confidence.

Let’s explore how modern automation solutions provide financial institutions with the essential tools to reduce errors, enhance operational efficiency, and ultimately safeguard account holder trust.

The High Stakes of Reputational Risk in Banking

Trust is the true currency of our financial system. Banks and credit unions that have well-earned trust with their account holders enjoy a positive reputation in the industry, a position that results in market-beating returns, above-average client loyalty, and sustainable long-term growth.

According to a 2022 Forrester survey, 93% of U.S. banking customers with high trust in their primary financial institution (PFI) say they would recommend the institution to friends and family, compared with only 39% of those customers with low trust in their bank.

Moreover, the same Forrester study found that 90% of U.S. banking customers with high trust in their primary bank say they would open an account with it again, versus just 34% of those customers with low trust in their PFI.

What Types Of Errors Can Erode This Hard-Earned Trust?

As institutions grow and add account holders, borrowers, new services, and market areas, they often confront a concurrent rise in human error.

As organizations scale, so does their operational complexity, increasing the likelihood of mistakes. Manual processes are more prone to human error, especially in repetitive tasks like data entry or reconciliation. The challenge of siloed systems and departments also grows, as poor integration across functional areas leads to inefficiencies and data inconsistencies.

Common manual errors that may have direct impacts on account holder relationships include miscalculated interest, delayed or misposted payments and transfers, and mistyped command lines that result in system downtime (especially during peak usage periods). These errors often result in an erosion of account holder trust, accelerated attrition, and loss of market share.

In addition, missed compliance deadlines or inaccurate regulatory reporting can mean significant financial penalties, enforcement actions, and damaged relationships with regulators and other stakeholders.

How Workload Automation Mitigates Risk

Fortunately, modern, end-to-end workload automation can help mitigate these risks by orchestrating processes across disparate systems and departmental silos. Here are a few examples of how this works:

• Eliminating Human Error: By removing direct human intervention from the process, the automation of routine tasks ensures consistency and accuracy. For example, the finance function can automate monthly reconciliation to prevent mismatches and ensure timely reporting.

• Better Regulatory Compliance: Compliance reporting is an essential but time-consuming task. By automating workflows, your compliance officer can ensure seamless alignment with regulatory requirements such as Basel III liquidity monitoring, Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) reporting, and the submission of Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs), without delays.

• Enhancing Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts: Modern automation solutions can proactively monitor ongoing job processes and flag anomalies, enabling you to detect transaction discrepancies and interruptions to goodnight processing before they escalate.

• Improving Operational Resilience: Automation also ensures system continuity during high-stress periods, such as audit cycles or peak transaction times, allowing your institution to manage cyclical spikes in transactions before or after holidays, or on major ACH deposit days. In addition, workload automation is instrumental in streamlining business continuity processes, including annual testing, system backups, and failover contingencies, ensuring minimal service interruption and providing your team and account holders with greater peace of mind.

For example, VyStar Credit Union's manual failover process took approximately two and a half hours to complete and entailed more than 150 manual steps. The Credit Union selected OpCon to automate its disaster recovery processes, successfully eliminating all risk of human error-caused core database corruption.

“We eliminated both the human error and the human stress levels associated with a manual failover process,” says Alex Castanheira, Systems Administrator at VyStar Credit Union.

Automation Helps Restore and Preserve Institutional Reputation

By reducing risk and enhancing operational resilience, a modern, end-to-end automation solution enhances trust in several important ways.

Automation offers transparency through more reliable communication with account holders. This gives members and customers greater peace of mind and confidence that their money is safe, and their transactions are being processed in a timely and accurate manner.

It also allows for more proactive error resolution, ensuring that mistakes are quickly detected and corrected before they reach the account holder level, or at least soon after they are reported. This is important, as financial consumers often cite responsiveness to concerns and errors as a key to establishing trust.

Through the use of active notifications and alerts included in OpCon, a leading workload automation and orchestration platform, TRUE Community Credit Union has effectively prevented service interruptions caused by inadvertent human or system errors and achieved more consistency and reliability in its operational processes.

“Right now, our goodnight process is automated to the point where it just runs,” says Chase Fisher, System Analyst at TRUE Community Credit Union. “If there’s a problem, OpCon will alert us and even provide information on how to fix it.”

Lastly, automation enables faster processing times and fewer delays in transaction posting, helping to improve the customer or member experience and resulting in heightened satisfaction levels.

For example, Logix Federal Credit Union previously manually processed 1,100 jobs each day. This heavy job load required data processing staff to be on call 23 hours a day during the week, as well as eight hours on Saturday and Sunday. The manual nature of these workloads left the Credit Union vulnerable to human error, with potentially significant impacts to its 154,000 members.

After implementing OpCon, Logix successfully automated 70% of its processes, including its “goodnight” jobs, reducing weekly data processing time by 40% and eliminating the need for active staff monitoring overnight.

As a result of these changes, member service improved, with 96% of surveyed members saying they would now recommend Logix to a friend. In addition, the data processing team was subsequently recognized as the Credit Union’s “Department of the Year”—twice.

A Matter Of Trust

Workload automation isn’t simply a tool for improving back-office efficiency, reducing operational costs, and giving time back for staff to focus on higher-level initiatives—it’s also a critical safeguard against reputational risks. Automation offers a competitive advantage, enabling your bank or credit union to be recognized as a secure, responsive, and reliable institution in the eyes of your customers, members, and stakeholders.

It’s time to embrace modern end-to-end automation as an effective way to secure peace of mind, maintain account holder trust, and reinforce your institution’s position as a leader in operational excellence.