Seven high-impact automation targets for financial institutions

It’s 2023, and technologies such as machine learning, robotic process automation, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in both customer-facing and back-office digital infrastructure, giving financial institutions the opportunity to take advantage of automation in business. opportunities are available.

As these technologies and the automation capabilities underlying them develop and mature, it is up to organizations and their IT decision makers to identify areas of business where these capabilities make the most value for money in terms of impact on customers, employees and Can give the most amazing performance. Bottom-line. Based on my work supporting financial services organizations in their digital transformation initiatives (with an emphasis on network connectivity, communications and security), here’s a look at the seven most impactful ways organizations can transform in 2023 and beyond Leverage the power of digital automation to:

enrich the customer journey

Automation across the communication channels that institutions and customers use to interact with each other is critical to providing the rich, disruption-free experiences that customers today have come to expect. Using AI and ML technology along with advanced analytics tools, organizations can develop a complete understanding of customer (and a household’s) preferences, then tailor automated, hyper-personalized offers and recommendations, through human-like automated chat/virtual agent interactions You can customize your trip with and the like. Many of these tools and capabilities can be found in the current generation of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms.

The mortgage line of business is an area that is particularly ripe for automation, given the ongoing constraints on processing and the customer journey. Building more workload automation into the mortgage process, from application to booking, can reduce human interaction and human error, shorten approval times, simplify compliance with reporting requirements, and move pipelines faster. and ultimately turn into the kind of enhanced customer experience that gives an organization a clear competitive edge.

Securing the network as well as the data, apps and users connected to it

First, the bad news: In 2022, according to the latest data from Contrast Security, 60% of financial institutions will be victims of a devastating cyberattack, 64% will see an increase in application attacks, 50% will experience attacks against their APIs, 48 % experienced an increase in wire transfer fraud and 50% detected campaigns to steal private market information.

The good news is that new layered cyber security strategies such as Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Security Service Edge (SSE) use automation to thwart ransomware attacks and other types of attacks that pose a threat to banks. SASE and SSE can be deployed in conjunction with a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN), and typically include firewalls as a service, secure web gateways, zero trust network access, and cloud access security brokers Can be deployed with a portal to manage. and automatic deployment of these elements. These comprehensive security frameworks can also be tailored for automated intelligent resiliency, ensuring service continuity without human intervention. The result is a unified framework for intercepting, inspecting, securing, and optimizing all traffic in a network that includes multiple branches.

simplify network management

SD-WAN not only gives organizations access to advanced security strategies such as SASE and SSE, but it also comes with automation that makes the task of managing a network across multiple branches simple and far less time-consuming. It does this by automating tasks that are traditionally set out manually. For example, SD-WAN can automatically detect network conditions and provide dynamic path steering and forward error correction to ensure high-priority apps get the performance they need. Through a single network interface, multiple moving parts of a network can be centrally managed with automated capabilities, including prioritization of network traffic to optimize bandwidth, maximizing network capacity at low cost Increases reliability and app performance. Such benefits explain why a November 2022 study found that more than 95% of enterprises have already installed an SD-WAN or plan within the next 24 months, and why, strangely, I Have seen so many financial institutions shifting to SD- VAN lately.

improve employee productivity

In the years when I worked as a bank executive, I can remember myself and other managers spending hours on repetitive manual data entry and document-shuffling – time better spent on high-value tasks. It would cost Automating workload and processes frees employees from monotonous, unnecessary busy work.

A financial institution can affect employee productivity by how it manages bandwidth in its communications network. For example, with SD-WAN, an organization can use automation to enforce policies that allocate less bandwidth (or restricted access) to apps that allow people to do their work (personal social media, etc.) ) can distract from.

Enhancing the Employee Experience

Automation is also proving its value in the HR side of business, for example, where organizations are using portals through which employees, enabled by automation, access self-service capabilities to manage their benefits. as well as training, upskilling and other resources.

Cross-selling and uncovering other opportunities

By automatically capturing and applying analytics to data from customer interactions and transactions, organizations can identify marketing opportunities for highly targeted additional products and services to existing customers, as well as develop personas that help them zero in on the right possibilities. They can then reach out and/or deliver highly personalized offers.

Sharing Insights in the Open Banking Ecosystem

Open Banking allows customers to connect their various accounts and control the sharing of their financial data through APIs that interface with other financial institutions and fintech companies. Automation can ensure that data and insights are securely shared between different partners within an open banking ecosystem, providing a seamless experience for customers across different apps being used within the ecosystem. essential for.

Bucky Porter is a financial services industry analyst at cloud-enabled connectivity and communications provider Windstream Enterprise,