How Intelligent Automation is Disrupting the Banking Industry

Banking is at our fingertips today.

Banks, financial organizations and institutions, and insurance companies are no more the places characterized by long queues, extensive workflows, and piles of paper works. Contemporary technologies have indeed metamorphosed financial activities today with immense digitalization. Of several technologies that have disrupted the banking and financial services industry, intelligent automation in this space has been a crucial one. The augmentation of software automation in banking with intelligent technologies has significantly widened the range and dexterity of their processes. 

Intelligent automation largely refers to the use of automation technologies, including artificial intelligence, business process management, and robotic process automation, with the aim to streamline and scale decision-making across enterprises. Intelligent automation, also known as cognitive automation, has a myriad of applications and helps simplify processes, optimize resources, and enhances operational efficiencies.

The combination of RPA with advanced technologies like AI, data science analytics, optical character recognition, process mining, and intelligent character recognition allows companies to seamlessly create end-to-end business processes capable of thinking, learning, and adapting on their own. The worldwide robotic process automation (RPA) market is forecasted to reach more than 13 billion U.S. dollars by 2030, which is an increase of more than 12 billion compared to 2020. (Source)

Key technologies leveraged by intelligent automation

1. Artificial Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence) — Computer systems effectively simulate human intelligence to help analyze data faster than humans and learn from past choices. By using machine learning and other complex algorithms that can analyze structured and unstructured data, businesses build a knowledge base and formulate predictions based on that data. This is the decision engine of IA.

2. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) — The usage of software robots or bots to automate repetitive manual back-office tasks, extracting data or filling out forms streamlines the tedious workflows. The bots complement AI by leveraging AI insights for managing complex tasks and use cases.

3. Business Process Management (BPM) — Business Process Management automates the workflows to bring increased agility and consistency to the business processes while improving interactions and engagement.

Why should businesses invest in Intelligent Automation?

As businesses have leveraged automation technologies to streamline their workflows, investing in intelligent automation solutions that can take the RPA, and AI paradigm much farther is wise. Intelligent automation can help businesses in four major areas—

Monitoring: IA enables organizations to continuously monitor business KPIs in real-time by augmenting siloed infra that helps highlight different patterns in the business process as a whole. Interactive dashboards developed using data science, analytics, and visualizations help remove outliers for proactive intermediation.

Listening: Businesses that adopt IA can make active listening and responding to emails, inquiries, social media, and other communication modes easier by processing structured and unstructured data.

Analyzing: Enterprises can efficiently analyze trends and patterns and suggest the next steps with the help of continuous learning through active monitoring and listening. The obtained actionable insights assist in delivering value even in crisis periods of the business.

Executing:  Leveraging IA helps induce end-to-end automation in business processes and entire business functions as well. The repetitive and mundane tasks that can be automated with RPA can be performed more efficiently and intelligently to eliminate frequent human interaction.

How HeadSpin helps improve Banking app experiences for end users

As banks and financial institutions struggle to cater to the new testing requirements and coverage for advanced digital features and apps, HeadSpin helps you achieve all your goals. 

HeadSpin helps test banking applications more efficiently and effectively and obtain the best outcomes. The holistic capabilities enable banking and financial organizations to ensure customers' seamless digital user experience. 

1. Global testing — HeadSpin helps run tests across multiple devices in various locations across the globe in real-world scenarios to deliver flawless user experiences. 

2. Integrate CI/CD pipeline for automating testing — The HeadSpin data and analytics platform supports multiple open test frameworks and offers a plugin for deep integration of the HeadSpin session with the CI/CD concept of the build. HeadSpin allows tagging each session with build_id that enables viewing all the devices being used during a build and at the end of the build statistics based on the HeadSpin performance data.

3. Obtain deep insights into app performance and user experience — The HeadSpin platform utilizes advanced data science to deliver AI-based insights into app performance by measuring and analyzing packet-level network data and several device KPIs through ML models and providing actionable insights. 

4. Leverage regression intelligence — HeadSpin allows running build-over-build regression to identify performance regressions. Additionally, the platform helps compare performances across  

• Different locations to better understand performance across different markets
• Different devices and OSs to understand cross-device/cross-OS compatibility and performance
• Different networks to understand network dependencies

5. Helpful data visualization dashboards (Grafana) and replica DB — HeadSpin data visualization helps users to extract data across various sessions and obtain experience and performance insights from the data. Replica DB enables users to export test data to their own dashboard solutions or their data lakes. HeadSpin visualizations help configure alerts and watchers for continuous monitoring of KPIs.

6. Leveraging Biometric SDK — HeadSpin allows users to add biometric SDK to their applications and enable automation of test cases that require biometric authentication. HeadSpin Biometric SDK helps capture user experience and seamlessly works with both facial recognition and fingerprint. 

Benefits of intelligent automation and how HeadSpin can help garner them across the Banking industry

Intelligent automation enables banks, financial services, and insurance companies to revolutionize their manual, data-intensive workflows and boost automation of the end-to-end financial processes, accelerating business performance and efficiency by reducing or eliminating the need for human intervention. 

With a combination of advanced technologies, Intelligent automation provides banking the opportunity to move entirely beyond the existing infrastructure and technology and meet evolving consumer demands to increase customer satisfaction and user experience. 

• Monitoring end-to-end user journey — HeadSpin's solutions can align effectively to assist financial services companies in monitoring the end-to-end user journey starting from the time of order placement by a merchant up to the completion of transactions on the client payment platform. HeadSpin's capabilities enable continuous monitoring of Client APIs that are consumed by the upstream apps and allow monitoring of the critical KPIs for user experience and performance. Further, the continuous monitoring and reporting capabilities allow the clients to ensure seamless end consumer experiences by leveraging several customized KPIs, visualization dashboards, and intelligent alerting for proactive issue detection.

• Enhancing banking and financial compliance — As financial data proliferates into this space, the need to secure the processes and ensure safe transfers, processing, and storage of data and aligning with compliance regulations is essential. Intelligent automation helps mitigate the risks related to data management and control processes more efficiently. Intelligent automation enables controlling access to data firmly such that only the information required for each task is available rightly, and thereby organizations can eliminate some of the primary risks associated with the use of remote shared services and improve data security. 

The PBox, a HeadSpin appliance, can be leveraged to test different apps on Android and iOS mobile phones, tablets, and other devices. The PBox can be deployed securely on the client's premises and access devices and run tests through the HS remote Control UI. HeadSpin allows a security-sensitive deployment by deploying the appliance and devices into an isolated network managed entirely by the client where no traffic leaves the isolated network. HeadSpin's on-prem deployment also offers the flexibility of deployment in specific locations like specific buildings, network end zones, and roaming.

• Improved customer services and experiences — For every business, the customer experience is one of the key priorities. Intelligent automation helps expand the capabilities of virtual assistants to improve customer service. HeadSpin has successfully engaged with leading banking and financial service providers to address their need to enhance digital banking services for customers. For a prominent client that has a multi-channel login approach, which allows users to connect using phone banking, internet banking, and WhatsApp channel for the bank, HeadSpin created user journeys for every scenario and evaluated each separately without securely. 

• Improved testing pace and coverage — HeadSpin's holistic capabilities help improve automation coverage for new digital features and apps across various consumer devices. The open framework enables re-use of the existing frameworks and scripts and needs zero new training for users. Further, HeadSpin offers crucial performance insights that help immediate identification of primary issues and resolution. HeadSpin's comprehensive solution has helped established legacy banks become leading digital banks, achieving:

Flexible deployment modules provided by HeadSpin

HeadSpin puts forth a number of deployment models that help deliver the industry superior outcomes to its clients.

On-Prem (Client Premises)

HeadSpin can be deployed on-prem in an isolated network managed entirely by the client where no traffic leaves the isolated network. 

Cloud (Single tenant)

This deployment model provides dedicated devices for clients in the HeadSpin cloud. Customer services, configurations, devices, and hosts are isolated to a private subnet; these enable testing of normal app QA scenarios as well as analyzing apps in global locations through local teams.

Cloud (Multi tenant)

HeadSpin provides access to shared devices deployed in the HeadSpin enterprise shared pool that caters to sporadic testing requirements and device-independent requirements.

Create Your Own Lab (Reverse Bridge)

The reverse bridge model (unique to headSpin) enables distributed testing from any location across the world with low latency access to remote devices and provides deep data and insights. This deployment model also helps manage QA for users having their own devices already.

Thereby, the comprehensive capabilities of HeadSpin help simplify software testing in the financial services, banking, and insurance sector to help gauge the essential performances of customer-facing applications and employee apps and improve the overall processes. 

How is HeadSpin different from many other competitive tools?

HeadSpin offers its holistic ML platform for testing and monitoring that seamlessly supports multiple device types/forms, including low, medium, and high-end devices, to run end-to-end testing with faster execution. Unlike many competitor tools that are not able to capture device logs, the HeadSpin solution enables device, network, and automation logs to be captured in performance UI.

Other features:

• Offers audio - enabled and multi-gesture supported devices and automation for APIs for accessibility testing
• Biometric SDK - No requirement for app instrumentation
• Portability of existing automation scripts with no proprietary framework
• Capability to automate Webview test cases

Conclusion

As the world forges ahead with digital advancements, the banking industry is preparing itself for continued importance. The cognitive technologies have unfolded immense potential for this industry, helping them meet the dynamic customer demands while improving the business ROI. The interaction with customers is an integral part of the regular processes within this industry; intelligent automation has simplified this and improved user experiences, an easy adaptation of digital systems, and better outcomes.