Automating data processing may save man-hours, but how do financial service organizations ensure the accuracy, availability and security of the data?
Automated management of data, when effectively harnessed, can yield results such as customer satisfaction as a result of processing speed, positive experience, and convenience.
Besides retaining customers and getting more transactions approved faster, financial service providers can also save time and manpower.
However, customer trust is often built on how reliable they find your services – be it via humans or machines.
How does intelligent automation help? DigiconAsia spoke to Greg Crowl, Vice President, Solutions Engineering, Asia Pacific & Japan, Kofax, for some answers.
How does intelligent automation help financial service organizations to transform customer experience?
Crowl: In the current volatile economic landscape, companies need to adapt and provide better customer experience. We commissioned an Intelligent Automation Benchmark Study survey last year, which showed that 94% of respondents said that customer acquisition and retention should be optimized.
Organizations need to acquire and keep happy customers to accelerate the business and to stay in business for that matter. Intelligent Automation helped in several ways:
- Standardizing business processes, so that they’re scalable and more complete.
- Enabling organizations to stay in compliance with governance policies.
This is one of the keys to customer satisfaction, especially in financial services such as banking and insurance – where people want extremely quick turnaround to their interactions. There is increasing pressure to get it down to minutes and hours for loan processes. Automation improves customer retention, and process efficiency and that results in employee satisfaction.
Our observation is that standardizing the process is very crucial so that the process remains within the platform, capturing that institutional knowledge inside of a process flow so the business keeps going even if workers come and go.
It is essential to reduce or eliminate the manual work that people have to do to get the job completed, especially when there’s a talent crunch. Intelligent Automation can automate activities such as customer onboarding and allow employees to focus on more productive activities.
The more automation applied to eliminate man-hours, the better. Any time you reduce the time cycle, it’s savings on labor and customer dissatisfaction.
How do you ensure security with intelligent automation?
Crowl: At Kofax, all the information we store or process through our system is encrypted at rest and in flight. There are many ways to look at security. Standardizing a set of processes is a way to ensure compliance and security.
Kofax’s solutions are run on the cloud, and we have cloud certifications such as SOC 1,2, 3 and ISO 27001 compliance. We are compliant with GDPR, PCI, and regulations as well. We also hire third-party consultants to pen-test and validate our security.
Whenever we’re handling the customer’s data or it’s stored in one of our systems, even if it’s running on their premises, Kofax has processes to ensure that it’s secure. We provide role-based access control, 2FA and SSO (single sign on) for authentication.
Where do you see low-code/no-code solutions applying in the financial sector?
Crowl: Low code provides tools for business users and business analysts that understand what the inefficiencies aren’t. In the past, loans and Insurance claim processing are more commonly done via a waterfall methodology whereby there is a disconnect between the business operations and processes and the people operating it and the people building the solution.
No-code/low-code solutions and citizen developer tooling allow the people who are right next to the problem to craft a solution for it. They can see an immediate impact of their competence on business knowledge, and institutional processes to be applied to the problem directly.
Kofax provides web-based tools so that organizations can easily create a workflow by extracting information from documents.
What are some of the key functions of Kofax’s platform?
Crowl: Our Intelligent Automation platform helps organizations to import a series of documents so that we can glean information from and classify what they are and then extract usable business information. We adopt machine learning, artificial intelligence as well as natural language processing for continual process improvement,
We have created drag-and-drop interfaces that are easy to use for business users in their browsers to create a nice machine learning model which is applicable for claims processing, credit card and mortgage loan approvals.
In addition, once we’ve extracted information from someone’s bank statement, we can help confirm the accuracy if we’ve got a system of record with a single source of truth. We also partner with other AI vendors as we have a big focus on an ecosystem approach.
We partner with companies that do forensic analysis of the document to see whether it’s been tampered with. We can then extract the data and validate the data through third-party services to do additional forensic analysis. This can help financial organizations to reduce credit risk and to be more competitive.
How do you see the insurance industry in terms of data utilization?
Crowl: Insurance companies have suffered in the past years due to the rise of cyber attacks. Intelligent Automation can drive and improve the efficiency of their processes on new customer onboarding, and policy underwriting.
An intelligent automation platform can extract the information from documents and streamline and improve the accuracy and decrease the time it takes to extract all that information and serve it up to a claims adjuster without relying on humans.
When it comes to capitalizing on analytics functions for claims, insurance companies have a major data challenge. Kofax can undertake process-level analytics and provide data on bottlenecks in the claims process. Since more data are made available insurance companies would be able to swiftly determine which businesses are secure enough to insure.
