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Case Study: A Leading Financial Services Organization Combats Transactional Fraud & Arrest Losses with AssistEdge RPA

March 2, 2022

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RPA or Robotic process automation in banking is the sure-fire strategy to reduce repetitive manual tasks and redirect resources to value-added services that align with the current market demand.

What is RPA & How Does it Help Banks and Other Financial Institutions?

Banks and financial institutions are working in an extremely competitive environment, and quite rightfully so, to pursue the desired efficiency in catering to changing customer expectations. A tad bit of automation can help the former achieve its objectives and stay afloat with the top trends of 2022. These trends show that technology is the need of the hour, so is automation. Hence RPA is the missing piece of the competition.

Robotic Process Automation helps banks improve their processes, curtail unnecessary expenditures, and, most importantly, reimburse for various fraudulent transactions.

Banking Sector – Potential Threats & RPA Solutions

Today, the banking sector has branched out into many subsidiary segments, each focusing on improving, managing, and expanding customers’ wealth. Retail, capital, commercial banking, and wealth management call for customer data that are both sensitive and vulnerable to possible cyber thefts.

Any fraudulent intervention can prove fatal for customers and add unnecessary financial risk for the bank in question. Customers trust banks with their wealth. However, an increasing number of fraudulent transactions put the bank’s reputation in the line of fire.

In 2021, fraudulent e-commerce transactions spiked between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. As per reports, 17.46% of all global transactions between these two days were potentially fraudulent. Countries like the US were the worst victims of such cyber thefts. The US customers and banks witnessed nearly 19.66% of duplicitous transactions in the same period.

Compensating every customer for their loss can put banks under tremendous financial risks. Unfortunately, this happened to one of the largest financial services holding companies based in the US.

Robotic Process Automation tools proved to be a blessing in disguise for this reputed firm and arrested repeated fraudulent transactions to a great extent, thereby saving nearly $500,000 in 6 months.

Let’s dive deeper into the case study to understand how RPA helps banks negate cyber-theft attempts intelligently.

Combatting Transactional Frauds with RPA: Case Study

The 147-year-old Fortune 500 firm started as a community banking service provider. Soon the firm expanded its services into other financial areas, including retail and commercial banking, investments, insurance, wealth management, asset management, corporate banking, capital markets, and specialized lending.

The firm’s exceptional track record in customer excellence precedes its reputation in other areas. But unfortunately, its reimbursement policy put the firm in a financial dilemma.

Challenges & Solution using RPA Software

Increasing fraudulent transactions compelled the firm to reimburse each client without reclaiming payments from their debit card and fraud monitoring provider. Even though these were low-dollar transactions, the high volume of reimbursements catapulted into millions of dollars in losses every year.

To arrest such fraudulent activities entailed the firm to abandon their paper-pen approach to validating every customer documentation. They realized the need for a digital-first approach. And Intelligent Automation was the answer.

With EdgeVerve’s AssistEdge RPA platform, the client was able to:

  • Automate the manual receiving and addressing debit card fraud claims
  • Identify the right fraudulent charges
  • Maintain a detailed audit trail for each settlement
  • Update the client’s internal system timely
  • Alert client for every failed or defaulted transaction in detail.

Automation of manual processes benefited the firm in many ways:

  • Increase in productivity by 8 times
  • 37,000 transactions processed
  • $500,000 saved in 6 months.

The above case study is an apt example demonstrating how RPA in banking helps. Let’s shed light on its benefits.

Benefits of RPA in Banking with Focus on Transactional Frauds

RPA solutions for banks and financial institutions can help fight increasing cyber thefts and safeguard customers’ information and wealth from any misappropriation. A few such benefits are discussed below:

  • Reassess Current Processes

    RPA software works like magic, reviewing every current and former financial transaction quickly. It identifies uneven patterns in the flow and arrests cases of fraudulent activities and piracies. Unfortunately, such minor patterns can easily escape human eyes. Thankfully, such disparities are easily detected on the RPA radar.

  • Eliminate Human Errors

    To err is human, is a fact. Bank employees have to deal with bulk customer data every single data. Subtle disparities are highly likely to escape their attention creating irreplaceable gaps in the system, leading to massive financial losses for banks. RPA accounting solutions limit employees’ interactions with high-risk processes involving numbers and other critical data. As a result, banks witnessed a significant drop in varied clerical errors.

  • Improve Trade Monitoring

    Money laundering is a serious threat to banks and financial services.

    Battling financial terrorism and money laundering cases require robust solutions akin to what RPA does. Financial process automation evaluates every transaction for potential fraud and flags high-value transactions to perilous sectors. Most importantly, these tools are programmed to raise a red alert whenever high-value transactions occur and investigate if any disparity is observed before the crime is committed. That saves the banks billions of dollars in losses and compensation.

  • Automate Temporary Block Removals

    Banks have to deal with hundreds of thousands of customer accounts. Quite often, a majority of them remain sedentary for months on end. As soon as banks note suspicious activities with these accounts, they place them under temporary blocks. Even though the temporary blocks age out, the blocks remain and can only be unlocked by a banking professional manually. That might take days, weeks, and even a few months or more, increasing customer dissatisfaction and disengagement.

    Robotic Process Automation tools and bots effectively identify accounts with such blocks, access past activities, and remove restrictions without human intervention.

  • Automate & Alert Threat Detection

    Scourging thousands of websites, unstructured data, and scattered information might prove cumbersome for banking employees. But this means nothing for RPA bots. As mentioned earlier, these bots are programmed to constantly monitor and identify disparities in known patterns and alert for plausible threats to concerned parties. Timely reporting of possible cyber threats can save banks many dollars in losses and avert major financial calamities.

  • Decide Right Claims Charges

    Banks are always under pressure to prevent money laundering and other such cases of financial debaucheries. Moreover, the former has to compensate affected parties accordingly, putting their survival in the line of fire. Unfortunately, like our client (as mentioned in the above case study), many banks reimburse clients for fraud transactions. Still, they do not reclaim these payments from their debit card and fraud monitoring provider.

    That approach places banks at high financial risks. Process automation software considers various parameters to identify the right fraudulent charges and helps banks easily reclaim them from the concerned parties.

  • Maintain Detailed Records

    It is a common practice – banks and financial services are subject to annual audits. The absence of proper documents covering each settlement raises many eyebrows. The bank’s reputation is questioned, so are the employees connected directly or indirectly with the firm. Financial process automation ensures a proper recording, documenting, and maintaining each transaction and settlement in detail, as required during auditing.

Is RPA the Best Solution?

Our client has been well-benefitted by the AssistEdge RPA solution. An automated process safeguards banks from financial frauds and ensures that your business ignores futile manual attempts, keeping costs at a bare minimum.

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