Presented by Blue Prism
In the wake of the pandemic, automation is taking center stage. Beyond cost savings, it’s helping organizations respond to volume surges, improve business resiliency, and more. Learn how it can help your company in this VB Live event.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is designed to deliver business value, says Giovanni Gentile, managing director of robotics at State Street Bank and Trust. The technology automates rules-based processes that humans usually handle, freeing them up for higher-value work, and making those processes far faster and more efficient. That’s why State Street is implementing RPA across the organization.
“We’re trying to take a better look at our business processes, where we can consolidate, where we can standardize, and where we can get the biggest bang for our buck,” Gentile says. “RPA is going to help us deliver business value.”
The biggest gains they’ve seen internally is capacity creation, he says, rather than having to let people go, smashing the misconception that RPA simply replaces people with robots and eliminates jobs.
“Let’s say 60% of your job is something we can automate — that’s going to give you 60% more time now to perform some value-added tasks,” he explains. “Where can we improve our processes? How can we better serve our customers? We’ve seen some direct translation of that.”
Their customers feel like employees are more attentive now, listening to their needs and fulfilling their requests. Improved accuracy has been a big advantage as well, for both customers and clients – and that directly impacts reputation. When a human is doing the work, there’s the potential for errors and omissions.
RPA is also helping them deliver on-time net asset value (NAV) reporting. Previously, they found that many of their internal processes cost a lot of manual labor hours, and when issues came up, delays occured, and they ran the risk of missing their NAV deadlines. Again, automation speeds up that process, and helps meet their deadlines, which also impacts customer satisfaction, he says, improves their reputation, and has even helped them achieve additional business as a result.
On the accounting side, they’ve automated their file archiving, in which they save financial documents in a centralized location. Automating that process allowed them to reduce the manual touches by about 50% – a huge savings that may not have resulted necessarily in direct ROI, but it’s preventative from a long-term savings perspective. The reputational damage and the financial impact of incorrect data, or of being audited and not following process, can be huge.
They’ve also automated the process of reconciling broker statements, where multiple data sources need to be accessed and verified. About 70% of this process has now been automated, removing manual touches and reducing the number of errors there. Individuals doing that work are now freed up to do more research and decision-making work that brings more value to their jobs.
On the transaction side, they were able to automate the process of checking close to three million monthly cash transactions, reducing the scope of manual work by about 75%. That reduced penalties for inaccurate cash reporting, and also improved their straight-through processing, or their ability to automate most or all of a process from start to finish.
And because of all of this, they’ve been able to reduce their fees — a huge competitive differentiator in a tight market. By becoming more efficient, they can become more competitive.
“Our number one goal is to deliver business value,” Gentile says. “We’re make some great strides there with our automation strategy, now and through 2021.”
To learn more about the benefits of RPA for every organization, why it’s more essential than ever to invest, and how to gain buy-in from the C-suite to the factory floor, don’t miss this VB Live event.
Don’t miss out!
Attendees will learn about:
- Evolving technologies used in automation initiatives
- How automation supports business resiliency
- Ways to scale automation across the enterprise
Speakers:
- Alan Farrar, Head of Automation, eBay
- Giovanni Gentile, MD Robotics, State Street Bank and Trust
- Josh Noble, Practice Director, Blue Prism
- Ted Shelton, Partner, Bain & Company (moderator)
