Many organisations are struggling with rising costs and the ongoing need to invest in their business to survive in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been proven to help organisations address these issues. Here we look at how a leading eFX trading organisation increased trading volumes and revenues by implementing RPA within its Customer Integration Centre.
A leading provider of global Foreign Exchange Trading Systems was under pressure to reduce operational and overhead costs related to its Customer Administration System (CAS). The CAS supports end-to-end client onboarding, including creating clients’ parent entities with users and accounts, mapping clients/users/accounts to trading counterparties, assigning entitlements, allocating credit, and providing permissions for pre-trading, trading, settlements, STP (Straight Through Processing), and reporting.
The process was hampered by the long time it took to onboard the necessary data and the high volume of human error due to the lack of automation. This delay prevented the customer from starting business in a timely manner and lead to a loss of revenue, increased costs and reputational damage for the organisation, as well as internal issues with low staff morale.
The Challenges
- Loss of revenue: A manual and cumbersome client onboarding process, which consists of over 150 steps across eight different streams and requires multiple approvals, is extending the lead time taken to approve customers for trading and therefore impacting revenue generation
- Damage to client relationships: High error rates caused by the high level of manual processing is damaging client relationships
- Low productivity and morale: Process inefficiencies and resource constraints are hindering productivity and leading to poor performance assessments and low internal morale
- Poorly documented business processes: ambiguous specifications are susceptible to individual interpretation and often result in activities being carried out unnecessarily
- High costs: Frequent changes to compliance and regulatory requirements mean that documentation needs to be reworked and the workforce retrained, increasing the overall costs to the department
The Solution
- Create a business case for RPA implementation that identifies the pain points being alleviated and how projected outcomes translate into financial gains
- Develop a change management model, collaborating with leaders and stakeholders to speed adoption and optimise success of the initiatives
- Conduct an assessment to diagnose and understand existing processes and landscape, identifying hurdles that need to be addressed and develop a remediation plan for each
- Evaluate and advise on selecting the right RPA tool and vendor model that is most suitable for current and future business needs
- Develop a strategic launch plan for RPA encompassing the optimal operating model, a governance plan, and the team delivery and alignment model
- Work with SMEs to optimise, standardise, and document the business processes being automated
- Work with cross-functional teams to develop and test the RPA solution and then put it into production with guidelines for on-going support, including proactive and reactive maintenance
Client Benefits
- A quicker, more efficient and accurate onboarding process that accelerates the end-to-end client onboarding, mappings and permissions process by as much as 80 per cent
- Operational excellence thanks to the removal of costly errors
- A 25 per cent productivity improvement within the first month, rising to 60 per cent over the course of the whole project
- Reduced operational costs thanks to the ability of RPA software to run continuously (24/7, 365 days-a-year) and the removal of human errors
- A flexible workforce (bots) that can be quickly deployed to meet business demands with zero ramp-up time, and with the ability to easily respond to changing business processes and priorities
- Detailed data captures that meet regulatory audits and compliance reporting
- RPA as a strategic tool deeply embedded in the company’s enterprise capabilities with a framework of continuous and measured benefits
