Expert: Nigel Armstrong, Head of Wealth and Asset Management Solutions at SS&C Blue Prism Facilitator: Blaise Cardozo, Director at Davies - Consulting Division
Overview:
Improving customer experience is a crucial first step on the digital journey and serves to retain clients. However, the need to invest in the future growth of the business by lowering operating costs is just as important. Happily, digitally automating manual activity across a business can lower costs by up to 70% and bring productivity gains, which leads to more time to improve customer experience.
The session began by looking at case uses for automation in financial services, including users such as pension providers, wealth managers, and investment research teams. Key processes cited as ripe for automation include client onboarding, data collection, compliance checks, report generation, and responding to queries.
But before an automation process is started, the need is first to devote some time to understanding existing processes and where they fall down. Process mining tools, it was thought, can be a great help with this because they can highlight inefficiencies and areas with high levels of manual intervention.
It was noted that in isolation, a two-minute manual process does not seem onerous, but when it is done at scale or required over multiple systems, it soon becomes significantly time-consuming. For example, one single process could end up with 50 different tasks and be handled by four different people before it being completed. If that is scaled, it becomes a problem. Thus, automation efforts should focus on scalable growth rather than just automating individual tasks. This requires assessing processes across the business to determine feasibility and projected cost savings from automation. In turn, this enables a more innovative approach where the foundations of automation are in place to support productivity and growth.
Finally, the participants acknowledged that it is impossible to automate 100% and that those processes that still require human intervention could be subject to discussion about best practices and optimisation.
In this context, it should be far easier to reframe the talk about how to scale and increase productivity and customer experience by taking the processes that are acting as inhibitors and improving them, making for productivity gains, lowering the cost to serve, and freeing up time to focus on customer experience.
Key findings:
- Processes that lend themselves to automation include client onboarding, data collection, compliance checks, report generation, and responding to queries
- Before automating, the need is first to understand how and where processes fail. Process mining tools can help with this.
- The focus should be on scalable growth across a firm rather than just automating individual tasks
- Taking the processes that are acting as inhibitors and improving them makes for productivity gains, lowers the cost to serve, and frees up time to focus on customer experience
