Robotic Process Automation (RPA) investment and adoption is gaining ground globally. According to Statista, 2019 saw investment climb to 49 percent and adoption to 24 percent by large organisations, with medium and smaller businesses lagging well behind. One area of business seeing a jump in investment and adoption is in Compliance and Risk Management. In fact, Nexis® Solutions has just announced a partnership with Blue Prism® to integrate Blue Prism’s connected-RPA with Nexis Diligence™.
RPA offers measurable advantages
What’s the appeal of RPA? In a survey on RPA Adoption, reports The Enterprisers Project, respondents realized multiple benefits from implementing RPA:
- 92 percent cited improved compliance
- 90 percent cited a boost in quality/accuracy
- 86 percent cited higher productivity
- 59 percent cited lowered costs
Despite the name, RPA looks more like software than a sci-fi android. Leslie Willcocks, professor of technology, work, and globalization at the London School of Economics’ Department of Management, explains in a McKinsey interview that “RPA deals with simpler types of task. It takes away mainly physical tasks that don’t need knowledge, understanding, or insight—the tasks that can be done by codifying rules and instructing the computer or the software to act.” Repetitive, high-volume, rules-based…sounds like the definition of due diligence, doesn’t it?
Banks and other financial services organisations have led the way on RPA adoption for good reason. Take the credit application process. RPA enables banks to conduct thorough credit analyses in hours rather than days. “RPA can perform such analyses as much as 15 times faster, with almost no errors,” writes Harvard Business Review. By using RPA to perform due diligence—whether on customers, business partners, suppliers or other third parties—organizations make important strides toward digital transformation.
Automating the due diligence process, for example, empowers organizations to apply the superior accuracy and speed of RPA to perform basic due diligence—screening third parties, compiling a report on findings, and notifying the risk or compliance analyst of report availability.
Return on investment in implementing RPA varies by application. Professor Willcocks says that analysis of 16 RPA case studies revealed ROI ranging from 30 percent to 200 percent in the first year. But RPA has value beyond cost savings.
RPA can also deliver positive impact in terms of employee job satisfaction. Professor Willcocks suggests, “The evidence is that it’s not whole jobs that will be lost but parts of jobs, and you can reassemble work into different types of job.” Rather than spending time on repetitive, manual processes, staff members can focus on more interesting tasks that require emotional intelligence. And as you can imagine, a more efficient, timely process when onboarding new customers or vendors leads to more satisfied clients and business partners.
