Pol Brouckaert, Director, Netcall Europe, says only by taking a holistic approach to transformation, can financial service organisations continue to thrive in the digital age.
Banks and insurers have invested heavily in the digitization of their customer channels over the last 25 years. Starting with static information websites around the turn of the century, mobile apps with the advent of the smartphone 15 years ago and finally, the widespread adoption of chatbots over the last five years.
In today’s increasingly connected and digital world, customer demand for faster, smoother, technology-enabled experiences has driven this digital acceleration – with front-end services prioritized in order to keep up. In parallel, the reliance on brick-and-mortar channels has declined significantly. In the EU for example, approximately 100,000 bank branches have closed in the last 15 years.
Transforming customer-facing processes, however, is only one piece of the customer experience puzzle. Keeping up with expectations requires the optimisation of all processes and workflows impacting the customer journey – even those operating behind the scenes. For example, whilst tasks such as applying for a loan or submitting a claim can now be initiated entirely online – without needing to pick up the phone or speak to an agent – processing these requests still often involves manual work in the background. Whether it’s KYC or AML checks, pulling relevant information from supporting documents to support a claim, or verifying financial details to determine loan eligibility.
For too long, these time-consuming back-end processes have been left behind on the transformation journey, yet it is these document and data-intensive tasks that have the potential to introduce delays and friction for the customer. Not to mention, their potential to introduce unnecessary costs, inefficiency and backlogs internally. For example, for small claims, the cost of processing it manually can sometimes be higher than the claim amount itself.
Now is the time to bridge the transformation gap and bring these back-end processes into the digital age. By doing so, financial service organisations can offer customers the real-time experience they seek whilst drastically reducing back-office costs.
Automate to accelerate
When introduced correctly, technologies such as intelligent document processing (IDP) and RPA can automate back-end processes such as claims and loan processing, removing the need for manual data extraction and keying data into downstream systems.
Instead, by utilising AI, these tools can accurately extract data from a variety of documents – and populate it into an easy-to-interpret interface. This means – if an insurance claim is submitted on a Friday, instead of being added to a queue to be reviewed by a human worker on a Monday, the documents can be checked in real-time. If anything is missing, customers can be notified right away, even on the weekend.
Additionally, in the case of applying for loans, if the customer has already been pre-approved and previously passed internal checks, they can get an instant response about their loan approval. Depending on the exact use case, we have witnessed Straight-Through-Processing rates of 80% and above achieved with IDP systems, with a human-in-the-loop required on less than 20% of the most complex and/or ambiguous cases.
Essentially, when processes are automated, bottlenecks are removed and lead times are shortened, meaning that customers can receive faster responses. This results in higher customer satisfaction as service delivery becomes more efficient, streamlined, and consistent.
Increasing employee satisfaction
Whilst customer satisfaction is crucial, the automation of back-end processes can also positively impact employee morale. Automating the repetitive and often tedious back-end tasks associated with document processing means that employees can be freed up to focus on more interesting and impactful work. For financial service organisations dealing with thousands of documents every week, removing the need for manual email routing and data entry allows workers to engage in higher-value decision-making or customer interaction, boosting job satisfaction and engagement. Peaks and troughs in workload also become much more manageable, rather than having to add additional staff for peak season and/or at times heavily stretch existing staff. Ultimately, when employees no longer have to perform monotonous tasks, they are likely to feel more valued and motivated, and more productive as a result. With workloads spiralling across most industries, empowering employees in their roles has never been more important and AI-driven automation is already having a huge impact.
A joined-up approach
Whilst the benefits of introducing automation into back-end processes such as document processing are evident, these become even stronger when integrated intelligently and aligned with other AI-driven capabilities across the business. In other words, to be truly impactful, automated document processing shouldn’t exist in isolation. By taking a platform approach, organisations in the financial services sector can begin to transform and connect with systems beyond document processing and achieve end-to-end integration with unified workflows that power better customer and user experience, improved efficiency, and cost savings.
With the current state of technology, it has never been easier to digitise end-to-end processes that include IDP. Whereas adding a new document type took several days or weeks with the previous generation of AI (supervised learning from a dataset with thousands of labelled examples), with a novel Large Language Model-based approach this can now be achieved in as little as 30 minutes.
The use of AI and automation within the financial services industry is certainly growing – with 75% of firms already using AI and a further 10% planning to use it over the next three years.
However, it is now time for organisations to consider where the true benefits of AI really lie within their organisation.
Whilst the technology certainly has an important part to play in front-end customisation and personalisation of services, the back-end mundane processes that could benefit significantly from the technology, should not be forgotten. Only by taking a holistic approach to transformation, can financial service organisations continue to thrive in the digital age.