A KPMG report stated that banks were fighting increasing cost-to-income ratios in the post-pandemic world. While banks are taking a variety of measures to optimize costs, employee productivity has still been a critical battleground. Digital technology adoption has been turning the tide for many industries. Can it help Banking? In this blog post, we will discuss five technology investments to improve employee productivity in the banking industry.
Employee productivity challenges in the banking industry
Banks are multiple input, multiple output organizations. Meaning that employees in the banking industry deal with several internal departments, regulatory bodies and government agencies to deliver a variety of services to their customers. In a typical workday of a bank employee, one has to perform hundreds of tasks, answer millions of questions, and manage bundles of documents. In the thick of things, bank employees are facing numerous challenges that are killing their productivity, including:
Manual tasks: Bank employees deal with a myriad of tasks, such as customer onboarding, loan processing, customer request processing, and answering customer queries, which consume a large part of their time. However, most of these tasks can be largely automated and save valuable time for bank employees.
Regulatory compliance: Compliance is a huge overhead for banks. Generally, banks need at least one employee to oversee three employees’ work and ensure compliance. Banks can take advantage of AI and other cutting-edge technologies to assist employees.
Documents overload: The life of a bank employee revolves around documents – creating, processing, retrieving, and archiving them. From a customer’s KYC documents and applications to the bank’s policy guides and checklists, a bank employee needs to manage hundreds of documents on a daily basis.
Security concerns: Banks deal with sensitive customer and financial information. With legacy systems, data privacy and security has always been in question. Bank employees have the responsibility to ensure security by following rigorous measures. This is an add-on responsibility for them.
Customer expectations: Customers expect seamless, personalized experiences from banks. They want services to be delivered much faster and issues to be addressed instantly. To deliver such outstanding experiences to customers while not overburdening their employees, banks need to adopt technology solutions.
Top technology investments to maximize employee productivity in the banking industry
Document management system (DMS)
Banks stand on two paper pillars. One, currency. Two, documents. If you consider the customer lifecycle in a bank, from awareness and onboarding through retention, every touchpoint deals with documents. Document management in banking is critical. How are you managing such an important component of your business?
While digitizing documents is a good practice, bank employees need better avenues to simplify and streamline document management. This is where you need a modern document management system (DMS) in your banking operations.
Document management in banking with traditional practices is cumbersome. For example, when a loan officer collects all the required documents from an applicant, the officer should manually verify the documents while strictly following regulatory requirements. Missing any documents could lead to non-compliance and operational risks. After validation, they need to archive the documents securely. However, conventional systems are prone to many risks, such as disasters and cyber threats.
With modern DMS systems, such as SharePoint DMS, you can streamline document management. SharePoint DMS enables effortless creation, collaboration, retrieval, and archival of documents. With security mechanisms, such as role-based access controls and encryption, the system ensures the privacy and security of the documents. Authorized employees can access these documents from anywhere on any device and work on them. In case of disasters, SharePoint DMS enables you to quickly and easily recover documents and prevent risks.
A leading BFSI company in India implemented SharePoint DMS to transform document management. You can download the case study to discover more.
Digital checklists
The banking industry is a highly regulated sector. To ensure compliance and operational efficiency, employees at all levels need checklists. In the real world, regulations and policies in banks change frequently. Typically, a bank deals with a regulatory change every twelve minutes.
What happens when you do not update your checklists as per the policy/regulatory changes? You’ll be at the peril of non-compliance.
In some cases, frontline banking employees do not get access to the checklists when they need. With traditional auditing/verification processes using manual checklists often face these risks.
Imagine you have a system where you can quickly update the checklists as per new policy changes. And your employees can access the latest checklists as you update over a mobile application, for example Microsoft Teams. As they work on the checklists, the solution automatically sends email notifications to respective stakeholders to take further actions. This way, nobody misses a single update or task with the digital checklists.
This is not an imaginary, idealistic scenario. Using customizable digital checklist solutions, such as Proceso App, you can eliminate challenges and potential risks in your banking operations. Want to see how Proceso App can boost employee productivity in your bank? You can book a live demo.
Conversational chatbots
As far as the banking and financial services sector is concerned, every minute wasted in responding to queries could cost the customers a fortune. Besides, poor customer support could cost dearly to you too.
Studies found that banks were losing one in five customers due to poor customer experience. In another report, we found that 64% of customers complained that their mobile banking app wouldn’t allow them to solve their customer support inquiry fast. A minute’s delay could lead to customer dissatisfaction.
Further, support agents often struggle to find the required information or fetch customer details while responding to their queries. These inefficiencies and delays could frustrate customers.
With the advent of LLM-powered conversational AI bots, such as C3GPT, you can now deliver quick, accurate responses to your customers with a touch of personalization.
You might have already noticed banks using chatbots on their digital channels, including websites, mobile apps, and social media. While these bots help you find answers, the responses wouldn’t be effective. And the interactions wouldn’t have a pinch of human touch. The rule-based AI bots have limited capabilities. Now is the time for conversational AI bots. With conversational AI, banks can unlock unprecedented agent productivity, save customer support costs, and reduce customer churn rate.
Computer vision
Computer vision is a cutting-edge AI technology that helps you analyze documents, images, videos, and visual inputs. How can a bank use computer vision to improve employee productivity, you ask?
Look around in your bank and you can find numerous tasks that can be automated using computer vision. For example, you can automatically extract data from printed/hand-written documents such as cash receipts, loan applications, collaterals, KYC documents etc.
Let’s take the example of Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB). The bank uses computer vision to identify customers and simplify the KYC process. ADIB’s computer vision solution reads information on customer passports and uses facial recognition to identify customers. The solution validates this information against the interior ministry’s database and verifies customer identity.
By automating manual tasks, computer vision helps you boost employee productivity while enabling you to eliminate human errors in the process. Thus, computer vision can boost operational efficiency too.
Intelligent automation
Robotic process automation (RPA) has been a widely adopted automation technique in banks. According to a Gartner study, 80% financial institutions implemented robotic process automation (RPA) to automate mundane tasks.
Now is the time to move from task-based automation to end-to-end process automation. You can combine RPA with AI technologies for intelligent automation to automate end-to-end processes.
There is no limit to the ways you can use Intelligent automation in the banking industry. You can use automate any process, which is repetitive, standardized, data-driven, or cross-functional, using intelligent automation workflows.
For example, Australia’s Heritage Bank used intelligent automation to automate more than 80 processes, including payments, fight fraudulent transactions, and enhance customer services, to a tune of 90%.
You can read more about the use cases for intelligent automation to streamline banking operations here.
These cutting-edge technologies will significantly automate cognitive routine tasks in banks and boost employee productivity significantly. Although implementing these technologies would come with a capital expenditure, when done right, these investments can improve employee productivity to employee cost ratios.