By Pamela Kundu
In an interconnected global economy, financial uncertainties and crises can ripple across borders, leaving a trail of disrupted businesses and shattered trust.
Incidents such as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the imminent economic downturn in Germany highlight the vulnerability of the banking sector. For Indian banking organizations, these challenges underscore the importance of proactive measures to retain trust amidst uncertainty.
One powerful tool at their disposal is automation—a force that can enable businesses to navigate through turbulent times while strengthening customer confidence. By leveraging AI-powered automation technologies, Indian banks can not only enhance operational resilience but also foster trust, safeguard customer interests, and navigate financial uncertainties with confidence.Seamless Compliance and Resilient Security Posture
As systems and data volumes grow, concerns about security, quality, and accuracy become more significant.
Automation can help strengthen data security strategies in Indian banking organizations that operate under the regulatory framework of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). AI-powered tools proactively detect and mitigate security risks in real-time, protecting both modern and traditional applications.
Banks can harness the power of automation to facilitate collaboration and communication, improving security posture and compliance along the way. This involves automating regulatory compliance processes across distributed systems, streamlining operations, and ensuring adherence to evolving regulations.
Automation also helps reduce the friction in customer interactions, providing a seamless experience while maintaining strict compliance. It enables executives to handle large data volumes efficiently, minimizing human errors and regulatory breaches.
Using AI-powered automation tools in data management and security, Indian banking organizations can establish hypervigilance and address concerns such as inadequate monitoring, ungoverned data-sharing practices, and compliance failures.
This approach also relieves security teams from excessive audit requirements, allowing them to focus on enhancing overall security posture. By embracing automation and leveraging AI-powered tools, Indian banks can achieve seamless compliance and establish a resilient cyber-security posture.
Staying Agile in a Dynamic Policy Landscape
AI-powered automation has emerged as an asset for banking firms operating in India’s rapidly evolving policy landscape. It offers numerous benefits such as optimizing costs, mitigating risks, strengthening compliance, enhancing customer service, and expanding resource capacity, even in the face of sudden policy changes. Leading organizations in the banking sector recognize these advantages and leverage automation to stabilize their workforces, drive growth, and build resilience within this dynamic policy landscape.
The recent implementation of the Foreign Trade Policy 2023 for exports mandates the use of automated IT systems with integrated risk management frameworks. This policy aims to streamline approvals and establish paperless, online mechanisms. Banks can also reap similar benefits by leveraging AI-powered automation as a crucial tool.
For example, Federal Bank experienced significant growth and expansion, leading to increased operations and compliance demands. They faced a challenging compliance deadline set by the Reserve Bank of India, requiring them to maintain Unique Customer Identification Codes. Manual efforts alone would have taken up to a year to meet this new policy requirement. However, by leveraging AI-powered automation, Federal Bank managed to reduce costs and successfully meet the compliance deadline in half the time.
Fostering Trust Through Hyper-personalized Customer Experience
Digital banking methods have truly transformed customer interactions as they now rely on smartphones, tablets, and laptops for convenient and secure financial activities. This shift has reduced the burden on bank professionals while optimizing resources and enabling effortless management of accounts, all this alongside easy bill payments and fund transfers through online apps.
However, with this shift, customers now demand even more robust security measures for a safe banking experience, as worse actors’ surface to scam individuals. In fact, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) reported bank frauds amounting to 604 billion Indian rupees in 2022, so clearly, robust security measures in the digital banking infrastructure are needed now more than ever.
Automation can help in a big way – especially in optimizing operations to support key industries like retail and wholesale banking. By leveraging AI-powered automation, banks can streamline customer journeys from the front office to back office, eliminating bottlenecks caused by customer communication in contact centers.
Whether through emails or phone calls, these communications now flow efficiently through the operations team, enabling prompt action and timely customer notifications. Moreover, automation proves valuable for handling fee reversal requests, addressing credit card-related queries, and enhancing customer onboarding, account opening, and transfers, ensuring Hyper-personalized customer interactions tailored to individual needs.
Additionally, banks can leverage AI-driven analysis of customer data and behavior to offer hyper-personalized customer experiences that foster trust and loyalty, offer personalized digital experiences, in the form of chatbots and intelligent communications, etc. Such levels of personalization can go a long way in retaining long-term customer trust in an interconnected world where expectations constantly evolve.
Automation plays a crucial role in helping Indian banks truly keep up in an ever-evolving digital and interconnected world. Embracing automated processes and advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, organizations can streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and provide seamless and personalized experiences to their customers. Intelligent bots can accelerate banks’ reconciliation process, translating to improved turnaround times. One bank that has benefitted from intelligent process automation is South Indian Bank, whose reconciliation process is replete with complex, time-consuming tasks. With intelligent bots now handling file downloads from multiple portals, performing checks, and automatically integrating data into accounting engines and core-banking solutions, the bank is able to both optimize its workforce and reduce customer complaints around delayed settlements. The bot also triggers timely notifications, so stakeholders can have greater visibility into the progress at each stage of the reconciliation process.
From effective data compliance management to strengthened cybersecurity measures, automation is a powerful ally that helps the banking sector foster success even in times of financial uncertainties.
(Th author is Pamela Kundu, Senior Director & Head of Sales Engineering, India & SAARC, UiPath, and the views expressed in this article are her own)
