Virtually Changing the Work of Finance through Robotic Process Automation
By: Joe Mills, director, special operations at Discover
Time may have been an illusion to some, but they probably never worked in finance. On the contrary, time is valuable, precious and limited. So, when Discover found a way to give some time back to its employees to focus on helping customers, we jumped at the opportunity.
Our commitment to innovation and customer experience drives Discover to find new ways to speed up processes that ultimately help us work smarter. To help achieve that commitment, we have been moving along our digital journey with help from Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which employs “virtual workers” to tackle high-volume, repetitive and manual tasks. Work such as systematic data entry and validation, mass email generation, account reconciliation and case-work management can be handled by a bot, where they used to be handled by our valuable human teammates. These virtual workers are automating tools and systems where not previously possible — and they’re changing the way we work.
With RPA, Discover can deliver a better customer experience. By reducing the time employees spend on repetitive tasks, our teams can spend more time on innovation, decision making and serving customers. Banking becomes more seamless and our customers become happier. So, while virtual workers focus on entering and validating data, our human employees can excel at customer interaction. There’s no doubt RPA is a revolutionary addition to our business — but it is supplemental, not substitutional.
“When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.” In other words, we’re careful not to overuse RPA. It’s a fantastic way to streamline tedious processes, so it might be tempting to apply it to everything but the kitchen sink — simply for the sake of using automation. But it’s important to be intentional.
Before Discover implements RPA, we evaluate our operations from start to finish, asking ourselves what business processes could use improvement and how we can best change them. One of those areas, for example, was asset reconciliation. This daily process required our teammates to balance the general ledger with a sub-ledger and check for any discrepancies. This repetitive process was a burden for our employees each morning, where it required almost no human judgement or reasoning. Through RPA, a virtual worker can tackle the non-human work of comparing the ledgers, mitigating the risk for error and saving time and energy so employees can focus on decision making, customer interaction and strategic work. Reducing these manual, repetitive tasks for our teammates not only saves time, it also could result in fewer financial and legal penalties with higher quality of its outputs.
To foster companywide ownership of RPA for process efficiency, we chose to equip our internal talent with training on this emerging technology, instead of hiring externally. While this approach presents exciting new growth opportunities for our employees, it’s actually easier to teach a tool or platform to existing employees than to teach domain expertise and institutional knowledge to new ones. It takes a long time to develop the deep understanding of our company and field that our employees have — knowledge that’s required before effectively automating.
Discover’s adoption of RPA shows our eagerness to remain on the cutting edge of technology while improving processes across our business. Using virtual workers to take over manual tasks for our employees is already giving them the opportunity to focus on innovation and customer service, yielding a better experience for our customers. We’re excited to continue down the path of automation — not simply for the sake of using automation, but for the sake of our business and our customers.
