Financial Robotic Process Automation

RPA in Finance

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the software solution that allows financial institutions to automate processes by driving user interfaces as a human would do. Through automating at the user level, you can leverage the benefits of automation without the cost and investment of integrating at a system or program level.

Many financial data jobs can be repetitive or mundane. For example, in banking or accounting organisations, combining excel spreadsheet data sets for reporting or consolidation purposes, is work that can be achieved using software robots. We are not talking here about a utopian society run by shiny metallic robots, but software aligning with user processes to record and playback actions to robotise business processes.

Deus Ex Machina

Employing software robots can be seen as divine intervention to a business problem of how to free up employee resources. I.e. re-tasking workloads so that they can concentrate on more rewarding, and ultimately more profitable fee-earning enterprises.

Similar to engineering robots which have transformed manufacturing industries. Software robots used in RPA offer many advantages over human workers performing repetitive tasks.

• Combining data from multiple Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets
• Account reconciliations against information stored in databases
• Picking up file drops into folders and processing file information for reporting
• Invoice matching against purchase orders using OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
• Payment processing via Payspan and Excel
• Cross-department administration functions for HR joiners/leavers