How Banks Are Driving Efficiency and Innovation with Intelligent Automation

Automation and AI are necessities for any modern banking enterprise. But we can reap even greater value when we combine them with machine intelligence to create advanced automations capable of handling the most complex use cases. Let’s examine how this form of intelligent automation can not only accelerate everyday banking processes but also transform cost centers.

Intelligent automation transforms essential banking processes

The majority of banks today already use AI in some capacity to streamline the more basic tasks that support fraud detection, market projections, customer service, and other business activities. AI is a time saver in these settings by automating monitoring and other repetitive functions that previously needed to be done manually. But especially now, in the age of generative AI (genAI), financial technology leaders are realizing they can tackle more demanding use cases by adding process intelligence to orchestrate multiple technology tools, without human intervention.

This is the realm of intelligent automation, and it’s vaulting banking operations to new levels of value generation and innovative potential. As with more basic forms of AI, intelligent automation can simplify workflows for increased efficiency, productivity, and cost savings. But intelligent automation can go beyond that to reconceive certain processes entirely—evolving them to be more user friendly and proactive in boosting employee engagement, improving customer service, and generating overall value for the banking enterprise.

Intelligent automation happens when we combine technologies such as genAI and data fabric in new ways to automate complex processes. It’s a system of systems approach that delivers capabilities more powerful than the sum of their parts. This positions teams to address some of banking’s most mission-critical use cases—from collateral management and credit assessments to governance, risk assessments, customer experience, and more.

For instance, a major loss mitigation firm specializing in the mortgage industry used intelligent automation for certain risk management services it performed on behalf of its clients. As a result, the firm realized $10 million in client value-add savings, a 30% overall lift in process efficiency. In another case, an international bank with more than one million clients transformed customer relationship management operations with intelligent automation that cut average customer waiting times in half.

Supporting innovation with intelligent automation

Intelligent automation operates at a highly strategic level to combine several types of technology, such as machine learning or intelligent document processing systems, in a way that’s rendered for easy interaction and control by human analysts. The best forms of intelligent automation achieve this by balancing machine and human intelligence on an ongoing basis through continual improvement loops.

This balance lets teams stand up robust environments for process innovation that efficiently route tasks between AI, other automation technologies, and business analysts. An analyst can selectively review AI outputs or respond to an alert to evaluate models or shape nuances of how the system makes decisions. In this way, intelligent automation elevates the business user from the tactical, day-to-day into a more strategic and proactive role—a shift that transforms traditional cost centers into bona fide drivers of revenue and innovation.

Consider the example of a bank’s operations division: As operations staff grow in their influence and command of automated processes, they can orchestrate more complex automations to address new use cases. Priorities shift from simply meeting SLAs and avoiding compliance violations, to also innovating new processes and reaping novel insights through behavioral analysis of operational data. As this happens, the character of the entire operation shifts from being a cost center to an innovation center.

The caveat here is that, as intelligent automation elevates operations or other division staff into analyst-innovator roles, these perspectives must be understood and supported at the C-suite level. Such transparency and buy-in can put the entire firm on more proactive footing when it comes to aligning automations across the IT estate to reap more efficiency and revenue for the organization.

Machine + human intelligence: the future of banking

Intelligent automation is a sophisticated form of automation that combines AI technologies and data together to autonomously manage complex processes and tasks. Nowhere is this more impactful than in the banking sector, where challenges related to complexity and scale are growing fast. And the most successful banks are combining more automation tools with machine and human intelligence in service of new use cases.