eBusiness Weekly
Dr Keen Mhlanga
Turbulence was the overarching topic for 2021 throughout all industries.
Financial organisations were already focusing on enhancing the customer experience, engaging with new digital-only entrants, and bridging the gap between front and back offices long before Covid-19. The epidemic has hastened their digital transformation ambitions by pushing companies to reconsider how and where financial transactions are conducted.
What will be the major subject for financial services in 2022 now that it’s year end?
Remote employment and virtual commercial transactions will undoubtedly become more common in the future. Financial institutions reimagined organisational procedures last year by using improvements in automation and artificial intelligence.
This pattern will certainly continue. We also expect companies to grow and automate processes more extensively in the next years, taking advantage of major breakthroughs.
We believe intelligent automation will revolutionise financial organisations in eight ways in the coming months.
The all-too-common chore of tedious, cut-and-paste data input in financial organisations eroded employee engagement faster than anything else.
This chore became a drudgery of the past using Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA exploded in popularity in 2021 as a result.
It was straightforward and quick to automate normal, monotonous activities. But, after that, where does RPA go? It all comes down to efficiency.
The need for digital is growing in response to the new normal.
The fifth generation of mobile technology has arrived, bringing with it a vast influx of data. In 2022, financial institutions will need to learn how to manage this tsunami.
They will be able to send, gather, and analyse exponentially more data than ever before in order to power company strategy and decision-making thanks to 5G.
Financial institutions who have the capacity and capability to safely absorb this avalanche of data, digitise it, and turn it into actionable business insights will be rewarded handsomely.
It all starts with document and data intelligence technologies that can transform unstructured data stored in 5G communications into structured data assets.
Traditional paper-based methods have been used by banks and financial organisations, but now that workers work from home, they are more risky.
Document/data categorisation, sentiment analysis, and secure content extraction from essential documents like as customer correspondence, mortgage paperwork, and loan applications will all require the use of AI and Cognitive Capture.
Data intelligence-enabled companies will be able to ride the 5G data wave to new heights of performance. Those who are unprepared will be bombarded with useless data.
Customer and employee happiness comes from transformation — creating simplified, seamless experiences. To do this, financial institutions are increasingly using RPA knowledge to higher-value initiatives, such as business workflow transformation.
For forward-thinking financial institutions, the year 2022 will be about combining their RPA automation capabilities with complementary technologies like as process orchestration and document intelligence to automate mission-critical business procedures.
In the extremely competitive financial services sector, even while employees are working faster, harder, and more effectively than ever before, it isn’t enough.
More to the point, established financial institutions are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with new digitally oriented entrants that aren’t hampered by old systems and manual procedures.
Then there are the bots, which have long been feared as a means of displacing humans.
Digital employees will be seen as the saviour of work-life balance in 2022. Employees will increasingly be given with digital workforce support when human productive capacity hits its limit, enhancing productivity while relieving people of the monotonous, repetitive job that keeps them at work late at night and on weekends.
In 2022, scalability of digital capacity will drive the agility required for competitive advantage. The next differentiator is digital capacity.
Workflows are the sequential actions that make up a complicated business process, such as customer onboarding, loan processing, and document approvals. Workflows are the DNA encoding how a financial organisation does things smarter, quicker, better, and cheaper. However, not every process is made equal. Financial firms will need to prioritize automations that will deliver the most value the quickest by 2022.
Business-line leaders are more positioned to focus automation initiatives on specific strategic business objectives as more intuitive intelligent automation technologies emerge. Previously, automation was mostly driven by IT as a technological endeavour. Business executives will become “consumer architects” in 2022, collaborating with IT in a pooled approach to alter data-intensive financial procedures via intelligent automation.
Numerous businesses, both in and out of the financial sector, are thriving in the new status quo thanks to automated processes inspired by citizen developers collaborating with IT.
This new approach improves agility, lowers technical debt, and decreases time-to-value. This methodology will be followed by financial institutions seeking to speed up their digital transformation initiatives.
Prior to Covid-19, businesses were fixated on using analogue tactics like as smart office technology and inventive office architecture to increase productivity, cooperation, and creativity.
For the financial services workforce, remote employment during a pandemic introduces a new paradigm. Many staff and consumers will continue to be virtual even after the epidemic is over.
Digital transformation is increasingly seen as the driver for increasing workforce productivity and improving customer experience.
Organisations who have mastered the digital environment, from collaboration technologies Zoom and MS Teams to automation tools are prospering.
Financial institutions that stick to traditional business models will continue to lag behind.
This tendency will pick up speed in 2022 and persist long after offices reopen. The revolution of digital workflows is here to stay.
In 2021, the favoured strategy for delivering sustainable workflow transformation results was incorporated intelligent automation systems.
These one-stop-shop platforms, which include pre-integrated, comparable automation technologies, give all of the capabilities and AI needed to automate rapidly, get fast results, and eliminate technical debt.
Despite the fact that platforms can automate 78 percent of activities, financial businesses will always need personalisation to streamline procedures that are specific to business. In 2022, ecosystems will be the grab resource for fulfilling that void.
Portals have constructed huge networks of technologies, applications, and services that operate inside an open, variable, and integrated frameworks, allowing users to access a range of services, pre-made connections, layouts, and solutions.
Financial institutions will depend heavily on these platforms to purchase the outputs they seek in 2022, enhancing their capacity to accomplish targeted automated test results.
AI will permeate throughout the financial industry in 2022, no longer being the unique realm of data scientists within huge corporations.
Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Intelligent Optical Mark Recognition (OMR), and Facial Recognition embedded in intelligent automation platforms will enable citizen developers in financial organisations to achieve digital workflow transformation, dramatically increasing productivity and speeding up work across the organisation.
AI and cognitive technologies will help financial organisations become more efficient, as these trends demonstrate.
Financial firms will be able to handle mobile banking and online financial services thanks to back-office automation, which will make them quicker, more secure, and less invasive.
Financial staff will spend more time pushing for higher services to consumers as digital workers undertake basic tasks. In 2022, financial institutions will be able to offer a superb client experience and gain a competitive edge by implementing digital process transformation at scale.
Founder and chairman of FinKing Financial Advisory/[email protected]
