In the classic film “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy and her friends arrive in the Emerald City to meet the Wizard only to pull back a curtain and discover a man frantically pulling levers and pushing buttons to keep the illusion of a great and powerful wizard alive. If one looks behind the curtain of a financial institution, they’ll also likely find a busy back office where employees handle tasks crucial to keeping the bank running smoothly.However, the staff running the show behind the curtain of a community financial institution (CFI) is bound to be much more adept than the Wizard, who struggled to keep the show going. The tasks these employees find themselves performing could be those such as data entry, invoicing, financial analysis, customer support, onboarding, benefits administration, compliance, and supply chain. While vital to any financial institution’s well-being, these items may be mundane, repetitive, and time-consuming to complete regularly. In fact, Todd Michaud, CEO of the AI provider HuLoop Automation, estimates that bank employees spend at least 30% of their time on mundane or repetitive tasks.With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI), though, technology is becoming ever more poised to take over these tasks cutting down error rates and giving staff room in their schedule to do more interesting, strategic work. The top areas to consider automation include:
- Data entry and processing. An intelligent process automation platform can look at web forms, emails, scanned documents, PDFs, and other data sources, extract and analyze the data, then organize that data and put it into spreadsheets or databases — all without manual intervention. AI can even recognize patterns and flag inconsistencies. In data entry and processing, AI can also lower the chance of human error and save a smart employee from hours of monotonous data entry, freeing that person to do more valuable work instead.
- Document management. AI can help a CFI manage documents in two ways. First, it can sort documents based on user-defined rules, including content and context. Version control and access management mean that employees keep control over who can see or edit documents, while making sure that writers, editors, and reviewers always see the most recent version. That facilitates team collaboration and provides an audit trail. Second, AI can extract information from documents. Rather than taking the time to read miles of text, users get a summation of any document, from white papers to emails. AI can even tell the reader if a message contains an action item.
- Accounting and finances. This is the last place most CFIs want to make mistakes. By automating invoice processing, expense management, payroll operations, and financial reporting, an institution gets faster, more accurate back-office financial functions. The professionals who no longer need to spend their time checking every decimal point are free to work on strategic analysis and planning for a CFI’s financial future. They make a newfound contribution to their organization’s agility and competitive abilities.
- Customer support. When AI chatbots answer routine customer questions, human customer service agents get the bandwidth to dive into more complicated or unusual queries. Customer support can also benefit from AI’s ability to summarize documents, because it can help an agent search for the answer to a customer’s issue.
- Employee onboarding. Onboarding a new employee often means loads of paperwork and data entry, as well as coordination between multiple departments. AI can automate the paperwork and streamline system setups, access permissions, benefit sign-ups, and training schedules. It can even adjust training schedules as a new worker’s learning pace changes.
- Manual tasks in commercial banking relationships. AI can write call summaries, draft follow-up emails, update customer relationship management systems, analyze customer intent, and share information with credit or marketing professionals.
By applying AI capabilities to back-office functions, CFIs can get faster results that are much more accurate and free from human error. AI can also release employees from repetitive, monotonous tasks, freeing them to do more interesting, complex tasks, as long as the usage is allowed within the CFI’s risk management standards.
