Despite the pandemic era assumption that most banking workflows have now been automated in the race to digital, for many, the number of manual or semi-manual workflows and processes has increased. In some cases, threefold, and this does not look like it will slow down any time soon.
Most firms (large or small) are still running on legacy systems; manual spreadsheets are widely used, and workers still key in data and validate filings, reports, and transactions. For many, only the customer or investor interface has been automated & even that may only be an inch deep.
When looking at workflow auditing, transaction reconciliation, and regulator reporting, the numbers of personnel undertaking low value and very repetitive tasks are the 100,000s. Banks simply threw more bodies at the problem (directly or indirectly) when faced with regulatory pressures. Employees are impatient with slow or lagging IT departments. They are told they must wait ages for coding capacity to become available and turn quickly to manual workarounds when seeking to fix an issue.
Why wait for IT to help when you can create a manual workaround for a problem? At this rate, there are as many people employed in banking to run these workarounds as there is front-facing staff to engage with investors and clients. How does this make sense? The impact on profit margins is immense, and the scope for operational error is exceptionally high.
Firms need to stop looking for ever-increasing market share to drive profitability. Still, they must focus on reducing operational risk, automating low-value workarounds, and increasing high-value-adding activities. Does it make sense to pay a six-figure salary to someone to run a series of spreadsheets and manually drive dashboards?
These workarounds drain productivity and create serious business perils. Prone to human and operational errors and key-man risk, they often dramatically slow the on-boarding of new clients, reporting, and product sales, resulting in reduced margins and poor customer service. Furthermore, these manual tasks mask risks and proliferate inefficiencies that build up over time and lead to costly enforcement actions along with poor customer experience (CX).
Furthermore, user-defined technologies hide risk at a tremendous cost and are unsustainable in the digital battleground.
How can we help?
EZOPS helps you eliminate the hidden risk and inefficiencies of user-defined technologies and workflows. EZOPS not only permits replication of all spreadsheet-based mathematical functions but also has the added benefit of audit history, version control, and integrated automatic data transformation, enrichment, and built-in workflow and reporting functionality. This results in a robust, standardized solution, delivering a single version of the truth—vital factors in generating accurate reports and making solid business decisions for key executives, managers, and users.
Automate:
- Low to no coding
- Data aggregation, validation, enrichment, and transformation
- Detection of anomalies in incoming data using EZOPS Curie
- Spreadsheet-based calculations
- Exception management via an integrated workflow and IPA (Rules & ML based)
- Reporting
Whitepaper:
Spreadsheet workarounds and manual processes hide risk at a tremendous cost and are unsustainable in the digital battleground. Data quality challenges resulting in manual workarounds impede growth for banks. The path to terminating consent orders and driving operational alpha and profits lies in intelligent automation. Read our whitepaper and learn how your business can automate user-defined technologies and/or manual workarounds to lower risk, drive efficiencies and improve profit margins.
