Jul 23, 2017
Financial Robotics
With the advent of science and technology and its ever increasing growth rate, the market stands in confusion. Industries and manufacturing units in different parts of the world have an important task at hand. They need to decide, how much automation does their company need? or what percentage of their man power would reduce, if they choose robots over humans? The developing countries though provide cheap labor but people here often have strikes, which leads to delayed manufacturing and heavy loses. The full automation on the other hand often releases them from these problems but incurs huge investments which can also lead to complete failure.
We are all aware of how physical robots have been replacing on-line blue collar workers, due to their increased efficiency and their non-tiring nature. But, what caught my eye is how robotics is changing the way financial companies do their business.
Financial institutions have large amount of data and regulations that they have to deal with daily and above all a small error can cause them to loose million. The stakes are high and they cannot let small errors pass by. Hence, they do rigorous training of their employees and perform multiple reviews within their firm. These actions entail large time and man power wastage and directly impact the profits of the company.
What to do?
RPA (Robotic Process Automation) can solve these problems. In simple term RPA is a software robot that is all set to take away white collar jobs and hand it over to automation.
Software Robot: A software ‘robot’ is a software application that replicates the actions of a human being interacting with the user interface of a computer system.
The robots can perform repetitive work without complaining with 100% accuracy and costs just 1/4th of the cost a human would take. It can work continuously and does not require any training after being programmed initially. RPA system can interact with different digital systems like spread sheets, emails and presentations and can easily mimic an actual human siting at a desk doing this job. The list of advantages is a long one and hence people are trying to fit the same in every industry to maximize profits.
HP has already started using the LEO platform to better provide customer service:
L — learn
E- Evolve
O- operate
This is used to automate the invoice scanning process. It can retrieve emails from an email account and can also handle multiple file formats. It can then segregate the files accordingly and can also handle responses to mails it is authorized to answer. This system improves quality, performance and control of the overall system.
Worldwide RPA has also been used to calculate tax, the system has the capability to add new regulations and then calculate the tax accordingly. Deloitte Taxlab 2017 conducted a live demo of the RPA system; here 3 analysts competed against a RPA system for tax invoice creation. What do you think the results were?
Well, the 3 humans together made 129 invoices in an hour whereas the robot individually made 192 invoices and was a clear winner (That’s what most of us expected :p).
One of the latest trends in the financial advisory market is the use of robots to replace financial asset managers. The robo-advisory systems as the people call them provide online wealth management services, which are based on computer algorithm. These algorithms based on your profile and your risk tolerance meter, suggests the user suitable bonds and stocks. With the influx of technology more information is available at the click of a button which furthers the use case as robo-advisory has a more open ended interface. The portfolio of any individual is updated on a regular basis which further provides higher return rates. Countries like USA and China have already implemented a fully automated advisory system, with humans just monitoring the whole process on the other hand India too has some robo-advisory platforms but they are not fully automated and do require human intervention.
Indian Robo-advisory: https://www.bharosaclub.com/
In conclusion, it can be said that robots are here to stay and they will be challenging your jobs or your businesses if you don’t change with time. Artificial Intelligence, new cutting edge technology and the access to real time data, when provided to a robot can make the world spin on its “mechanical” fingers.
I would love to hear your take on financial robotics. Until then, keep reading. Cheers.
