Since pneumatic tubes streamlined the transfer of documents across banks and mainframe computers revolutionized back-office processes, automation has been a driver of innovation and progress in financial services for over a century.
In today’s digital world, automation’s latest iteration has the power to transform operations across departments and use cases: customer onboarding, underwriting, compliance, and more. But realizing the potential of modern automation requires a fresh mindset and a certain level of readiness, understanding, and maturity—and not all financial services institutions are there yet.
What is “automation maturity” and what does it look like in financial services today?
Longitude, a Financial Times companypolled 500 senior executives in banking and asset management from nine countries and from their responses, we developed an interactive benchmarking tool. With this assessment, FSIs can compare their progress against the industry at large via Appian’s proprietary index.
Highlights follow from this new tool and the insights behind it.
10 dimensions of automation readiness
Appian’s new tool assesses automation maturity from 10 dimensions. To get a glimpse into the first four, ask yourself the following questions:
Does your organization think about automation by department or across the enterprise?
If your answer is the latter, your organization engages in—and benefits from—enterprise-level thinking. This means that you manage workflows holistically as a unified enterprise, rather than through a siloed approach as individual departments or teams. Enterprise-level thinking is a cornerstone of modern automation projects, which rely on strong business process management.
Do you think of automation as a series of tasks—or as a platform?
Shifting beyond a task-by-task approach enables your organization to harness platform power. This means you can use low-code automation platforms to automate end-to-end processes and orchestrate diverse systems, databases, AI, APIs, bots, and humans.
Do you see automation as a business problem or an IT problem?
Modern automation requires democratization: multidisciplinary teams beyond IT working together to develop solutions. In some “automation mature” organizations, this plays out as an automation center of excellence, where IT and business experts collaborate as equals.
What kind of governance and controls do you maintain over your workflows—human and automated?
Strong governance, visibility, and control over all automated and human workflows supports proactive risk management, robust regulatory compliance, and operational excellence—all things financial services institutions need to compete in today’s business environment.
The many benefits of automation maturity
A financial services institution with a high level of automation maturity stands to gain a host of competitive advantages, including:
- Digital-first capabilities and culture: You’re able to continuously improve digital and data systems, governance, and expertise, which supports more, and more sophisticated, automation use cases.
- Advanced intelligence: You’re able to harness AI to continuously develop more advanced and effective automation solutions. This increases your power to transform workflows, business processes, decision-making, case management, and more.
- Greater speed and agility: With automation, you’re able to develop flexible, agile, and responsive systems for rapidly adapting to change, while continuously monitoring and optimizing your processes.
- Empowered employees: “Mature” organizations are able to use automation to augment their workforce with both bots and more engaged, motivated, and productive employees.
- Engaged customers: Financial services organizations can use automation across the customer journey: delivering engaging online and mobile experiences, swiftly deploying new products and services, empowering their employees to deliver industry-leading customer service, and maintaining visibility and control at every step.
- Business impact: Automation’s many benefits add up to cost efficiencies, shareholder and stakeholder value across a diverse range of business areas and metrics.
Ready to see where your company stands? Take our assessment today. [J1]
