5 Signs Workload Automation Is No Longer a "Nice to Have"

Traditionally, financial services organizations like banks, credit unions, and insurance companies have had limited options when it came to managing critical operational and data processing tasks. Most file transfers were handled via overnight, batch processing jobs. While designed to handle very large sets of data, these jobs typically took hours to run and could be derailed by system outages, manual errors, and miscommunication with vendors. This would often result in wasted time, business interruptions, and a poor customer experience.

Fortunately, workload automation and orchestration (WLA&O) can have a powerful, positive effect on an institution’s operations, solving for these daunting pain points in several ways. Automation allows banks, credit unions, and insurance companies to streamline or eliminate manual tasks, seamlessly orchestrate workloads without adding resources, and give time back to staff and management to focus on strategic growth initiatives.

But how do you know if your organization has reached the point where automation is no longer a luxury? Here are five signs that WLA&O may have evolved from being simply a “nice to have” to a critical need for your business:

1. Your organization is growing.
   Workload automation can provide organizations of all sizes and types with the benefits of time savings and reduced costs regardless of the firm’s stage in the business lifecycle—ranging from brand new, de novo banks to legacy institutions of 100 years or more. But efficiencies tend to compound as an organization grows in asset size, number of employees, and complexity. The sweet spot typically begins around $200 million in assets and 50 employees and scales from there.
   
2. Your tech stack is becoming more complex.
   As financial institutions grow, their technology stacks naturally become more complex. And today, as firms migrate more of their stack to the cloud, they’re partnering with dozens of financial technology solution providers that typically don’t speak the same language. In such complex environments, it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure systems are properly integrated and achieving efficient load balancing and distribution of network traffic across a multitude of servers. That’s where WLA&O can play a vital role.
   
3. You need to hire.
   When organizations face new challenges, such as increasing loan volumes, new product introductions, or the growing burden of regulatory compliance, their knee-jerk reaction is often to hire their way out of the problem. But adding headcount is an inefficient and expensive solution. More people, especially when added too quickly and with inadequate training, only leads to more errors and costly cleanups. Workload automation is designed to help organizations scale efficiently—without adding headcount—while cutting down on costly manual errors.
   
4. You’re undergoing a core conversion.
   One of the best times to implement WLA is when you’re undergoing a major technology conversion, such as a migration to a new core ERP system. This may seem counterintuitive—who wants to deal with multiple major technology projects simultaneously? But it makes sense when you consider that your project team is already going through the exercise of identifying current jobs and workloads for the purpose of mapping them to the new core. There’s no better time to leverage workload automation to capture efficiencies and time savings for the future.
   
5. You’re already using automation in your business!
   Achieva Credit Union first implemented OpCon workload automation and orchestration in conjunction with its conversion to the Corelation KeyStone core processing system, with an initial focus on automating daily batch jobs. Once Joseph Spangenberg, Senior Application Administrator at Achieva, learned that OpCon offers a direct integration with the FICS® mortgage origination and processing system via a custom application programming interface (API), he quickly decided to leverage the powerful workload automation and orchestration solution to help streamline Achieva’s mortgage processes.
   
   “We started out very small with OpCon—just running batch jobs within our core. Since then, we’ve used OpCon to run workflows like a SQL job that produces a report we can send to a vendor,” Spangenberg says. “We've implemented FedLine Command, which is an absolute game changer for ACH files, and now all of our ACH is completely automated. We no longer have to log into the Federal Reserve Bank site to download or upload ACH files. The application has scaled with Achieva as Achieva has grown.”

Digital transformation has arrived in financial services. As consumer expectations evolve and banking technology grows more complex and sophisticated, organizations are finding it increasingly challenging to keep up and are devoting more and more resources and staffing to back-office operations.

Workload automation and orchestration is designed to help financial services organizations get time back to focus on strategic and growth-oriented initiatives in a competitive industry. No longer simply a “nice to have,” WLA&O is the solution that will help your organization compete and maintain optimal productivity now and in the future.