Intelligent Workflow Automation in the Banking Sector

While a survey by IBM shows that 80% of respondents still prefer to keep their savings in a traditional bank account, many banks struggle to adopt innovation and deliver the true customer centricity offered by most of their FinTech rivals. If implemented properly, banking process automation can make traditional financial services more personalized and convenient for users. Learn what automation in banking is, how it can give FIs the edge over their competitors, and why it is best to embark on the automation journey with Camunda.

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Why Is Automation Crucial for Banking Today?

According to a study conducted by Fact.MR, revenue from AI and automation in the banking sector is predicted to skyrocket from about $33 billion in 2024 to almost $230 billion in 2034. Tough competition with innovative FinTech companies and growing consumer demand for personalized financial services are cited among the key market drivers.

Indeed, traditional banks are no longer beyond competition when it comes to financial services, and they are not ahead of the pack in the current technology race, either. Cryptocurrencies, money transfer services, mobile payments apps, robo-advisors, P2P lending, and other technology-driven solutions designed to provide an alternative to traditional financial services changed the rules of the game and spoiled customers with fast, simple, and convenient ways to manage, invest, save, and share their money. Over the last six years, the number of FinTech companies worldwide has almost tripled, and McKinsey’s research predicts that between 2023 and 2028, the sector will see its revenue growing three times faster than that of traditional financial institutions.

It’s no wonder that banks are ready to invest heavily in automation: it gives them numerous opportunities to enhance and refine their core banking processes and gain the efficiency, agility, and innovation required to survive the digital disruption. However, process automation in the banking sector often fails due to its focus on incremental changes rather than comprehensive process innovation. For example, a report presented by Ernst & Young says that 30% to 50% of robotic process automation projects suffer a setback, with one of the top causes being a lack of an end-to-end change program. Luckily, the siloed automation problem has a solution, and it is called Camunda.

What Is Camunda?

Prior to explaining what Camunda is and how it helps with automation in banking, let’s draw a line between workflow automation and orchestration. While these terms are often used interchangeably, there is an important difference, and understanding it might be crucial for choosing the right tool for your business needs. Automation is often used as a point solution when some kind of software runs a specific task or process, replacing manual work or at least reducing human involvement to a minimum. Orchestration is based on a more holistic approach to managing business processes — it works by coordinating multiple point solutions across different endpoints and ensuring end-to-end visibility, even throughout the most complex workflows.

So, what is Camunda used for? It’s a universal process orchestration platform, which is open-source, cloud-native, and easy to integrate with a wide range of endpoints, including systems, technologies, devices, and even people. The Camunda platform is used to:

• design and configure all kinds of workflows;
• create decision tables to specify requirements for automated and manual decision-making;
• build user task forms for workflows that require human intervention;
• test and demonstrate business processes before deploying them;
• run workflows automatically and monitor them in real-time;
• connect various technologies for smooth automation;
• collect KPIs and valuable analytics for business process optimization.

With the Camunda software, businesses can orchestrate microservices, RPA bots, ML models, AI services, and human tasks, thus combining automated and manual workflows into seamlessly running business processes.

Why Leading Banks Choose Camunda

Morgan Stanley, NatWest, ING, Goldman Sachs, Desjardins, Truist, and Santander are just a few of the major financial institutions that have already benefited from the intelligent Camunda orchestration. The Bank of NY Mellon, for example, now has over 70 Camunda workflows up and running to service more than 100 million of its task items. So, why do leading banks give preference to this platform when choosing banking automation software?

• Smooth business and IT collaboration. Business users and developers work together more efficiently when designing workflows in Camunda with intuitive visual languages based on open and universally recognized BPMN and DMN modeling standards. Any banking process can be represented through easy-to-grasp diagrams, linked to decision tables that are compliant with business policies and properly configured in a simple interface. Thanks to Camunda’s low-code opportunities and AI-driven assisting tools, tech-savvy business stakeholders and IT teams can engage in Camunda business process management.
• Dealing with complex business processes. While end-to-end automation for banking is often hampered by the complexity of processes and the diversity of endpoints, including legacy systems, modern microservices, and everything in between, Camunda process orchestration solves the problem with ready-to-use integrations and simplified workflow modeling. The Camunda platform offers out-of-the-box inbound and outbound connectors, connector templates, and an SDK for custom-built integrations to seamlessly connect a mix of technologies to business processes accurately expressed through advanced BPMN workflow patterns.
• High performance and resilience. Zeebe, the cloud-native Camunda workflow engine, is a perfect fit for automation in banking with the high volumes of concurrent transactions and strict resilience requirements specific to the industry. The Camunda distributed architecture allows for effortless horizontal scaling with more cluster nodes added when required to cope with high loads at low latency. The Camunda workflow engine doesn’t depend on a central database and ensures unbeatable fault tolerance via a built-in replication mechanism where all data are stored across interchangeable nodes.
• Open and polyglot-friendly platform. Banks don’t need to force their existing systems into Camunda process automation since its open architecture and developer-friendly design allow IT teams to choose their preferred programming languages and tools for complex business process execution. The Camunda platform comes with open-source SDKs for Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, Go, and C# developers. It provides clients with fast and easy integration with DevOps CI/CD pipelines and gives access to powerful APIs for trouble-free interaction with Camunda components.

The Benefits of Automation in the Banking Industry

An abundance of repetitive tasks, such as filling out forms, entering data in corporate systems, and updating account details, makes automation in the finance industry a vital need rather than just a promising option. According to a study, workers in the accountancy, banking, and finance sectors spend over three hours a day on manual, mundane administration tasks, which is nearly half of their standard working hours. Moreover, 64% of the surveyed workers believe that these tedious operations reduce their overall productivity, and 51% of them admit this prevents them from doing their main job.

As automation in banking operations goes beyond data processing, it brings financial institutions many benefits:

• Efficient workforce utilization. Based on a survey of 1,000 US workers, 86% of them want automation to reduce their manual work so that they can focus on higher-value tasks, such as personalized customer support or strategic planning. Apart from better utilization of employees’ skills, replacing tiresome manual tasks with process automation in banking results in higher employee engagement and job satisfaction paired with lower turnover and burnout.
• Error reduction. Humans are prone to errors, and monotonous work makes them even less attentive and more likely to slip up. Automated data processing reduces error rates dramatically, which saves time that would otherwise be spent on fixing mistakes. This protects banks from financial and reputational losses, eliminates compliance issues, and improves data quality for decision-making.
• Enhanced customer satisfaction. According to the same survey, 57% of customers listed accurate outcomes as the most important factor when engaging with a business or service, and 66% of the respondents placed financial services and banking first among the industries where automation helps to better serve their customers. When combined together, higher accuracy, quicker services, customer-centric employee behavior, and a seamless customer journey ensured by end-to-end banking process automation translate into many happy customers and increased profits.
• Improved compliance and risk management. One of the main advantages of automation in the banking sector is simplified compliance, with digital workers strictly adhering to established rules, AI algorithms thoroughly analyzing transaction data and customer behavior, and banking automation systems recording every action for further audits. In addition to compliance monitoring, automation tools allow banks to identify potential risks and proactively address them in a timely manner.

There are also additional benefits to business process automation in banking, including accelerated decision-making, time and cost savings, better scalability, and stronger security, but actual gains really depend on proper implementation.

Camunda Use Cases for Automation in Financial Services

While many modern banks successfully use robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other advanced technologies for financial services automation on a local level, i.e., in workflows that involve a simple sequence of steps, they often fail to achieve true end-to-end automation where a whole business process runs smoothly regardless of how many systems, devices, technologies, and people it spans. Let’s have a look at some examples showing how Camunda makes a difference in banking process automation:

• Accounts payable. Automate the entire accounts payable cycle by bringing together optical character recognition technology, AI-powered bots for document processing, accounting or ERP systems, electronic payments, humans responsible for invoice approval, and Camunda, which will route the documents throughout all the required steps and trigger alerts and notifications for AP managers to keep the process on track.
• Mortgage application processing. A banking automation system driven by Camunda can use RPA, OCR, and ML algorithms to process applications, extract data from government portals, enter data into mortgage loan origination systems and CRMs, evaluate credit scores to determine mortgage eligibility, send emails to applicants for additional information, and deny or approve loans based on pre-defined decision rules.
• Customer onboarding and KYC (Know Your Customer). To ensure end-to-end onboarding and KYC automation in the banking sector, Camunda orchestrates RPA bots, web scrapers, facial and optical recognition technologies, ID verification software, risk management platforms, internal databases, decision tables, and email services. This can lead a new client through the whole process, from receiving an application to opening an account.

In the same way, Camunda can coordinate other workflows with complex logic within business process automation in the banking industry, including:

• account opening and closure
• debt collection
• deposit handling
• payment processing
• customer self-service
• customer support
• compliance reporting
• fraud detection
• financial reporting and analysis

Besides, Camunda comes in handy for internal automation in banking and finance, for example, helping HR departments with new employee onboarding or assisting IT teams in system maintenance and monitoring.

Why Use Camunda? Benefit from End-to-End Automation

Actually, there are far more reasons for banks to fall in love with Camunda, especially if their IT teams have to struggle with inefficient homegrown workflow engines and monolithic BPM systems or go with no business process management at all. Here are some areas where Camunda workflow orchestration excels:

• Camunda fosters agility. With Camunda, it is easy to start a big digital transformation step by step. Banks can embark on the journey by choosing only one workflow with a distinct beginning, obvious endpoints, lots of tedious manual work, and clearly visible benefits, such as a new account application, and automating it end-to-end. It won’t take longer than 8-12 weeks to design an MVP for the workflow in Camunda and start enjoying a strikingly different level of transparency and manageability. The ROI achieved with the Camunda orchestration is sure to propel further automation initiatives and switch your organization to agile mode.
• Camunda doesn’t require pumping heavy investment into automation. According to a study, a third of the companies face budget-related challenges on the way to digital transformation. One of Camunda’s advantages is its adherence to an open-source strategy, which allows banks to use its free components for both development and production along with open-source solutions from other vendors. This is a budget-friendly approach to automation in banking, complemented by an alternative opportunity to first invest in small processes that require a license and then scale up, thus spreading the investment over time.
• Camunda allows for modernization without going to extremes. The above study says that 62% of the respondents experience difficulties in achieving their hyperautomation goals because of legacy tech. The flexible architecture of Camunda enables FIs to build automated workflows and integrate them with the core of their legacy systems without rushing into radical changes. Alternatively, banks can move their business logic from the legacy systems to external components in Camunda, design micro-processes to trigger the decision engine, and arrive at banking process automation by combining several micro-processes within one workflow.

Facts speak for themselves, and Forrester’s research shows that financial institutions that adopted Camunda workflow orchestration can enjoy an ROI of 408% along with a payback period of eight months.

The Future of Camunda in the Banking Sector

Thanks to the unparalleled visibility into business processes provided by Camunda, the platform is sure to see a surge in demand stemming from financial services regulatory changes expected in the near future. Here are just a few examples of the new requirements Camunda is ready to meet:

• US Executive Order on AI and EU AI Act. Financial institutions have to assess risks associated with the use of AI, such as discrimination and privacy threats, and ensure human oversight over their AI systems. By providing transparency into AI-driven processes and including people in the loop, Camunda helps to instill the necessary compliance when implementing automation in banking and financial services.
• Basel III updates in the US, EU, and UK. Banks will need to adapt to the revised capital requirements along with new reporting and disclosure rules aimed at strengthening their resilience to economic shocks and improving supervision in the banking sector. Both Camunda Optimize and Operate features, with their near real-time monitoring and reporting opportunities, can deliver valuable insights and metrics to enhance risk management and meet the requirements.
• Interagency Guidance on Third-Party Relationships in the US and DORA in the EU. Both regulations address the issue of third-party risk management and require ongoing monitoring and the maintenance of a complete inventory of third-party relationships. Camunda can provide visibility into exposure and risk across third-party relationships, manage automated processes responsible for controlling third-party access to systems, and maintain audit trails for reporting purposes.

One of the Camunda benefits that makes it highly suitable for the strictly regulated banking sector is the flexibility of its BPMN and DMN modeling, which enables banks to introduce changes into their automated workflows promptly and easily.

Embracing Camunda with a Gold Certified Partner

The IBA Group is a Camunda Gold Partner with more than ten years of experience in Camunda process automation, including optimized workflow implementations in banking. Our team of certified engineers helps financial institutions refine their business processes, automate routine workflows, and seamlessly transition to end-to-end orchestration fostered by the Camunda platform. Within our dedicated Camunda BPM offer, we provide full-cycle process automation service covering:

• processes analysis
• requirements specification
• processes rollout
• internal/external services integration
• processes optimization
• user training
• warranty support

Fill out the form, and our experienced engineers will devise a plan addressing your business’s specific challenges.