How India’s BFSI Sector is Meeting the Pandemic Challenge Through Technology
The pandemic took a terrible toll on financial institutions globally and brought unprecedented economic upheavals. Businesses that were still clinging to legacy technologies felt the need to adapt to stay resilient in their approach and were prompt to embrace digital adoption. Now the pandemic has pushed organizations inevitably to build digital solutions to remain resilient, relevant, and deliver uninterrupted services.
The use of innovative automation technologies in the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sector has reinvented the business trajectory as this supports financial entities in refining business operations during this pandemic.
Quickly Deploy Apps Through Low Code
As Indian financial institutions continued looking for solutions to overcome ongoing challenges, speed and flexibility were top priorities to create applications that can speed up, streamline updates, and process customers’ data in real-time.
To that end, low code allows making updates at an incredible pace, unlike the traditional practice where developers had to manually write codes, making the process easier by providing solutions.
During challenging times, the capability to build optimized digital applications without relying on developers brought speed and resilience by addressing challenges with applications and introducing new functionality to the existing operations.
Touchless Transactions
To ensure business continuity, BFSI has to address a specific business challenge regarding reducing human interactions and dependencies. The most pressing concern for BFSI is to operate under social distancing and safety requirements.
Simplifying ways to address complex verification and onboarding processes through biometrics like face, touch, and voice for quick and safe identity verification made a difference in adding speed, safety, and accuracy for operations. By introducing digital signatures, BFSIs can authenticate unambiguously through a digital signature by leveraging DocuSign and unlocking access to critical services. With these developments, 90% of the financial institutions have automated application processing, KYC verification, and customer support.
Conversational Chatbot and RPA
In bridging the gap between the BFSIs and customers, intelligent chatbots support businesses in connecting with customers and engaging with them through digital interfaces. The technology has taken over the responsibility of all the mundane and repetitive tasks, including simple data management activities and vital roles such as customer service, employee collaboration, processing transactions, etc. It has significantly reduced the requirement for human labor and helped streamline operations.
For example, at the pandemic’s peak in 2020, HDFC Bank, India’s largest private bank, launched its chatbot Eva (Electronic Virtual Assistant) to help customers access products and services and resolve issues faster. This move has helped the bank make banking operations seamless and build digital capabilities to serve customers better.
From simple bots that can handle frequently asked questions to intricate robotic process automation (RPA), that can recognize customers’ voices, chatbots can offer instant solutions to a broad spectrum of complexity. A bot’s emotional recognition capabilities across customer touchpoints are the much-needed solution for these trying times. By implementing hyperautomation technologies to add efficiency into operations, BFSI institutions were able to reshape their products and services by providing consolidated offerings to meet shifting customer expectations.
When it came to Know Your Customer (KYC), an RBI-mandated process, Indian banks could leverage AI and ML to identify the documents. Banks could also create the customers’ KYC profiles by extracting and parsing the information using OCR.
Hyperautomation: The new-age solution benefitting BFSI firms
The entire BFSI sector has started leveraging the power of hyperautomation to help from the reduced cost by automating job functions, ensuring 100% regulatory compliance, faster delivery and increasing volume of services, optimizing resources, and boosting overall productivity.
BFSI firms are harnessing the power of hyperautomation to ensure regulatory reporting with minimal or no workforce requirement. Utilization of the skilled talent for other value-added tasks, the overall operational efficiency and productivity with a reduced scope of human errors, and low operating costs are the significant advantages that BFSI firms enjoy while treading on the path of hyperautomation.
Data quality, documentation accuracy, and streamlining processes such as reconciliation, compliance, etc. are other benefits that the sector is reaping by embracing this approach. Customer servicing, banking and lending operations, monitoring transactions, and preventing fraud are other significant benefits of hyperautomation deployment in the BFSI market. Due to these reasons, technology has been growing considerably and will continue to pick up speed in the times ahead. In its recent report, Gartner points out this trend and states that the global hyperautomation market is expected to reach $596.6 billion in 2022.
Summing up
It was essential for the Indian BFSI segment to undergo disruptions and transform digitally to recover from the pandemic and tread on the path of growth. Automation and hyperautomation stepped in a saving grace for the sector. These solutions are helping in digitally empowering the BFSI firms in the truest sense so that they can enjoy a competitive edge in the market and cater to the industry’s ever-evolving needs. This is where the automation and hyperautomation service providers step into the picture. They play a crucial role in enabling the Indian BFSI firms to undergo digital transformation seamlessly and deal with nationwide challenges effectively.
(The author Deenadayallan Sellamuthu works as Lead Business Consultant at Vuram and the views expressed in this article are his own)
