Discover the impact of Robotics Process Automation (RPA) on financial services compliance

RPA can contribute to more effective and efficient compliance processes

Several aspects of compliance oversight operations can be enhanced through RPA implementation. As noted, monitoring and testing is an especially promising automation candidate. RPA’s capability to pull and aggregate data from multiple sources could also enhance the efficiency of regulatory, non-financial, and risk reporting as it can help eliminate or reduce the time-consuming processes of collecting, compiling, and cleansing, and summarizing large amounts of information. Other potential automation candidates include the risk assessment process, complaints management, and investigative/root-cause analysis processes. 

Monitoring and testing highlights RPA's compliance potential

Monitoring and testing provide a powerful example of RPA’s potential to transform compliance operations. For example, financial service institutions execute a portfolio of individual tests to determine if their various operations are compliant with specific laws, rules, regulations, and as appropriate, internal policy directives (collectively known as regulatory requirements).

RPA readiness can enhance and accelerate implementation

An important element of RPA planning is assessing the readiness of existing processes, data, systems, and the overall governance structure for the introduction of automation. Processes should be evaluated to determine if they are stable or require remediation before automating. If process re-design, fixes, or upgrades are imminent, an assessment should be performed to determine whether process re-engineering should occur during the development of automation or whether automation of such processes may be premature.

Three challenges to address before implementation

​Many questions remain to be answered regarding the technical implementation of RPA. While the use of workflow and decisioning technologies has grown over the years, new challenges are arising.

1. One emerging concern is what happens when there are dependencies among automated activities, such as activities performed by bot 1 that trigger those performed by bot 2?
2. Second, who will own RPA implementation is another important consideration.
3. Finally, once RPA is implemented, ongoing bot management will require clear definition of how issues will be handled to achieve timely, effective resolution.

RPA is just the beginning

While RPA is demonstrating its capacity to improve process effectiveness and efficiency, expand capacity, boost quality and consistency of outcomes, enable greater scope of coverage, and potentially reduce costs, it’s also a harbinger of more to come. Breakthroughs are occurring in cognitive automation, artificial intelligence, and other tools which promise to automate ever-more judgment-based, complicated tasks.