Gartner defines robotic process automation (RPA) as a tool that “performs ‘if, then, else’ statements on structured data, typically using a combination of user interface (UI) interactions, or by connecting to APIs to drive client servers, mainframes or HTML code. A RPA tool operates by mapping a process in the RPA tool language for the software “robot” to follow, with runtime allocated to execute the script by a control dashboard.” RPA systems are becoming widely used to cut costs, eliminate keying errors, speed up processes and link applications.
RPA systems “watch” the behavior of users or operators performing clerical capture and routing tasks and learn to recreate those actions based on different aspects of the task, information collected, document types, content source, and other processes. The output produces one or more transactional business processes – such as accounts payable, trade finance, insurance claim processing or loan origination.
Ephesoft adds data intelligence to RPA tools. By combining both technologies, financial services organizations can access a more comprehensive pool of data to make smarter decisions. A growing number of financial services organizations are beginning to incorporate RPA functionality with different use cases, as we’ve seen with a large bank.
RPA in Banking Use Cases
One of South East Asia’s largest banks uses best-of-breed technologies, specifically in smart document capture and robotic process automation (RPA), to automate two key areas of their businesses:
- Trade Finance
- Corporate Loans
Trade Finance
The bank uses both Ephesoft and Blue Prism in trade financing to capture all types of documents from purchase orders, bills of lading to invoices. The bank uses Ephesoft to handle the capture, classification and extraction of the key information needed from these forms before exporting to structured spreadsheets where Blue Prism will effectively handle the matching and validation work using their Digital Workforce or robots. Then, Blue Prism delivers the completed results to their document management systems.
Corporate Loans
A similar process takes place in their corporate loans department around automobile financing, an enormous and growing business across the region. For corporate loan processing, application forms and supporting documents are ingested in Ephesoft from various sources (fax machines, multi-function printers and email folders). Then, Ephesoft captures the documents, classifies and extracts values such as name, company ID and other necessary metadata and exports the metadata to an Excel spreadsheet.
Next, the bank creates a set of macros and Blue Prism’s Digital Workforce takes over by picking up and replicating this behavior using their recording functionality. From there, Blue Prism Digital Workforce automatically keys the relevant information into their document repositories. The previously tedious and heavy set of tasks are now streamlined, efficient and fully automated.
Using this best-of-breed approach, the bank has been able to automate a bulk of tasks across these two essential business units. Additionally, the solution has already created new avenues for future scalability across multiple lines of business.
To learn more about how to onboard documents or use Web Services APIs with RPA tools, feel free to contact us or request a demo.
