ABN AMRO Harnesses Automation to Enable Customer-Centric Services

Innovation

ABN AMRO aims to deliver personalized, high-quality services at speed and scale while meeting stringent regulatory requirements. To do so, automation is key. In this case study, you can read the journey ABN AMRO went through regarding automation. Read about why automation is important, how the automation journey developed, the benefits and future plans.

Banking is changing

Over the last decade, the rise of the digital channel has fundamentally transformed consumer expectations around the speed, convenience, and personalization of banking services. To meet these industry imperatives, ABN AMRO has developed a future-looking strategy aimed at helping its customers bank for better, for generations to come.

To realize this goal, ABN AMRO is reimagining its processes and systems with the customer experience at the center. The aim is to build a deeper understanding of individual customer needs and preferences, and offer tailored solutions to address them — available on any channel, including online and on mobile devices. At the same time as it invests in customer-facing services, ABN AMRO is enhancing its operations behind the scenes with the goal of building a future-proof bank. By shaping an agile, integrated, and inclusive organization in which all lines of business work together as one, the intention is to empower ABN AMRO employees to offer personalized and seamless customer experiences.

Addressing industry imperatives

The evolution of consumer expectations is not the only factor influencing strategic decision-making for ABN AMRO. Over the last ten years, the introduction of new banking regulations has increased significantly in frequency, including anti-money laundering measures such as know your customer (KYC). As a result, customer due diligence (CDD) processes have become an even more crucial stage of the customer onboarding journey.

In the past, many key business processes at ABN AMRO relied heavily on manual work. For example, the CDD workflow involved employees collecting data from several different systems of record, and then collating the information so that it was ready for analysis by KYC specialists. The bank looked for a way to eliminate as much of the low-level, tedious work as possible, empowering our talent to focus on the value-added activities that contribute to customer satisfaction and future-ready operations.

Selecting a proven automation solution

Automation is a powerful way to liberate employees from manual work and free up time and resources for more complex and rewarding activities. The bank decided to pilot Kofax RPA to help streamline some of the organization’s most labor-intensive business processes.

Benefits of automation

• Delivers a time- and cost reduction of up to 90% for all processes automated.
• Empowers the bank to unlock new efficiencies and accelerate its customer-centric transformation.
• Lays the foundation for hyperautomation, supporting the next phase of the transformation journey.

Proving the concept

In 2016, as the first step on ABN AMRO’s automation journey, the IT team began with a small-scale proof of concept for Kofax RPA. Stakeholder buy-in was really important and workshops were organized to show the added value. It stakeholders that automation was an untapped opportunity and it showed that building highly effective software robots is actually quite simple if you have the right tools — even for non-technical users.

Across ABN AMRO, teams began to recognize the potential of intelligent automation to support strategic initiatives around business transformation: including enhancing the customer experience and building future-ready operations. Over the next two years, the bank developed hundreds of RPA use cases — including automating the data-collection stage of the CDD process.

The CCD process is very suitable because these mission-critical processes intersect with regulatory requirements. The costs of getting things wrong can be severe: ranging from fines from the Dutch Federal Bank to reputational damage to the revocation of a banking license. Automation is a perfect match for these types of processes because robots are 100% accurate and — if properly configured — will perform large volumes of work on time, every time.

Pascal Smissaert, IT Lead for Robotics and BPM at ABN AMRO explains the benefits of automation using Kofax RPA for KYC processes:

“Our KYC process requires a mixture of data-collection work and human expertise, and we employ a specialist team to assess CDD information and make informed decisions. Using Kofax RPA, we now gather all the required information from multiple systems of record at the end of each working day and attach the data assets to the relevant customer case files automatically. When our KYC employees log on in the morning, the cases are ready for them for review helping us to ensure that we deliver a responsive onboarding experience for the customer and meet our regulatory requirements — all in a highly cost-effective manner.”

Driving a culture of innovation

From its origins as a proof of concept carried out by a single team in the IT function, by 2019 RPA had grown into a mature discipline within the bank, driven by more than 60 full-time software developers. These teams include stakeholders who liaise with the business to understand their specific pain points and help ensure the automation solutions meet their needs. Pascal Smissaert describes:

“Fostering a culture of innovation was one of the keys to moving as quickly as we did. By running regular hackathons, we empowered our developers to work on the projects that are most important to them, which gave rise to many valuable robots that eventually entered production.”

Embracing a federated approach

Because of the big growth of automation, the organization realized that a fresh approach was needed to avoid spreading its RPA specialists too thinly. They decided to embrace a federated model, in which our work on the platform would be carried out separately from our delivery activities. This way of working has a number of advantages according to Smissaert:

“On one hand, we have a central team responsible for enabling the RPA capability, maintaining the platform, and issuing usage guidelines. On the other, we have delivery teams who are now more closely aligned with the respective product owners in the business. This federated approach gives us the best of both worlds: a central management and governance framework that guards against the risks of shadow IT, paired with the agility and flexibility to deliver rapidly to our stakeholders in the business.”

After more than two years of pursuing the federated model, ABN AMRO continues to reap the benefits. The company is disseminating RPA skills throughout the organization significantly faster than before — enabling it to scale the automation program across all parts of the enterprise. Today, the ABN AMRO delivery team is subdivided into eight separate teams, with a total of 65 developers. In the platform team, the company employs six engineers and involves more than 100 people in its downstream testing and quality assurance processes for new software robots.

Moving to the cloud

As part of its ongoing transformation, ABN AMRO decided to infuse
the latest cloud-native technologies and DevOps methodologies into its development process. One of the first steps was to move the entire RPA application stack onto the Azure cloud. Michelle van den Hoek, Product Owner Robotics at ABN AMRO, comments:

“The cloud approach offers many benefits over a traditional, on-premises architecture. As well as significantly reducing our operational costs, Azure enables us to add infrastructure resources and onboard new teams to work on our platforms extremely quickly. This cloud scalability is also elastic, which means we can spin environments up and down quickly according to our requirements in the moment, and pay only for the resources we actually need.”

Today, ABN AMRO runs Kofax RPA on Azure, with real-time dashboards to track key performance indicators such as service levels and cloud infrastructure spending.

Shifting to hyperautomation

As software robots become ever more deeply embedded across its organization, ABN AMRO is focusing on the next stage of its digital transformation: hyperautomation. Guido Bosch, Solution Architect — RPA Platform Team at ABN AMRO, explains:

“For the bank, hyperautomation means that anything that can usefully be automated, should be automated. While we recognize that human intervention will always be required in many processes, the promise of hyperautomation is that this input should be the exception rather than the rule — and that it should never relate to a low-level task. For example, if a human worker needs to make a decision as part of a wider process, there should be no need for them to copy and paste that data into multiple different systems. In fact, a truly hyperautomated process would be able to validate the data and advance itself to the next workflow stage after collecting the necessary human input, without any need for the employee to take any other action.With a hyperautomated approach, processes can be rearchitected so that they could be handled quickly and efficiently.”

Laying the foundations

To help realize its hyperautomation goals, ABN AMRO is now planning the technology and organizational requirements. The company plans to leverage a number of different technologies, including Kofax TotalAgility for intelligent enterprise-content management automation. In the first stage of the journey, the objective is to combine Kofax RPA software robots with a business rules layer to form a new hyperautomation platform for the bank.

This platform will integrate with ABN AMRO’s core systems, enabling the organization to build automated, next-generation digital capabilities without the need to rip and replace its legacy application infrastructure. Creating prototypes in a low-code environment will enable the bank to rapidly deploy minimum-viable products, validate their effectiveness, and create high-code production instances further downstream. Benjamin Blaauw, Head of Development Automation at ABN AMRO elaborates:

“ To achieve the goal ‘automate anything’ both on the organizational part and technology structure are very important. On the people side, our move from central to federated teams is extremely important, as it deepens our connection to the business and improves communication between our platform teams and our product owners. On the technology side, we’re very pleased to have access to solutions such as Kofax TotalAgility, which will deliver a solid set of capabilities and trained machine learning models that are ready for us to use. Kofax TotalAgility will also be very easy to integrate with Kofax RPA, which is the core enabling technology as we embark on our hyperautomation journey. Once this integration work is complete, the platform team will be in a strong position to start building hyperautomated
solutions for the business.”

Looking ahead, ABN AMRO is confident that hyperautomation will offer dramatic improvements in its speed and agility in everything from customer service to bringing new offerings to market. For instance, by creating low-code forms for employees to input data and automate the manual handling, the time to market could potentially decrease substantially, making it 80% faster.

Reaping the benefits

While the bank’s hyperautomation journey is just beginning, ABN AMRO is already measuring substantial benefits from its investment in software robots. Automation, using Kofax RPA, is now supporting a wide range of business processes throughout the organization — including operations, finance, and human resources use cases in retail, corporate, and private banking. For instance, in anti-fraud processes, a range of different technologies is used to help detect and deal with financial crime. Benjamin Blaauw continues:

“Without automation, we estimate that it would require up to 50% of our headcount to work in areas such as detecting financial crime or anti-money-laundering activities. Now, we can drive robust financial crime processes and meet our regulatory objectives with 30% fewer dedicated personnel. As a result, we can achieve high operational cost-efficiency while simultaneously freeing our people to focus on customer-service excellence.”

Enhancing customer services and the future

Automation is now part of key processes across ABN AMRO, helping the bank to accelerate workflows such as the issuing of credit cards and mortgages, and to ensure that paper and email communications intended for deceased account-holders are immediately redirected to their beneficiaries. Benjamin Blaauw mentions:

“We have achieved incredible results with automation over the last five years, cutting the time and cost of all the processes we’ve automated by up to 90%. While these savings are welcome, they are no longer the key driver for our automation efforts. As we integrate new technologies and stride toward our hyperautomation target, we are focusing our attention on building a future-proof architecture for the bank, powered by the optimal combination of best-of-breed technologies and standardized business processes.”

At the same time as it prepares for a hyperautomated future, ABN AMRO is also harnessing its existing technology platforms to shape more streamlined and tailored customer experiences in the present.

“We recently formed a brand-new Process Automation business unit, which is dedicated to improving the customer experience. The opportunities are endless. For example, customers with both personal and business bank accounts are currently served by two separate lines of business in ABN AMRO, which means that customers call one team to discuss their personal accounts and another for business banking enquires. By using automation to integrate these teams’ systems and processes behind the scenes, we can take down the barriers between the two lines of business, enabling a more consistent and convenient experience for the customer. The objective is to make ABN AMRO a process automation leader in the financial services industry by 2024, and to set the standard for other organizations in our market to follow.”

Want to know more?

Read more on hyperautomation in this article by Benjamin Blaauw. To read more about Kofax RPA, click here.