China is a hotspot for various digital trends, driving institutions to invest in everything digital to increase business growth, enhance customer engagement, and improve operational efficiencies. Moreover, in an ageing society with increasing labour costs, RPA and intelligent automation are expected to play a significant role in the Chinese institutions.
The IDC Financial Insights Asia/Pacific (IDCFIAP) report, China: The State of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Intelligent Automation in Financial Services, says RPA and intelligent automation will play a pivotal role in addressing business problems and goals in China in 2020.
"By 2023, IDC expects that 80% of financial services institutions (FSIs) in China will deploy intelligent automation solutions to achieve an exceptional business value and deliver a more real time and contextual customer experience," said Sneha Kapoor, research manager at IDC Financial Insights Asia/Pacific.
Drivers of adoption
Institutions in China are interested to bring in intelligence to the automation of their business processes with intelligent automation. These institutions want to act on both structured and unstructured data to generate data driven insights, improve decision making, achieve operational efficiencies, and deliver a more personalized customer experience.
The RPA industry gained traction in China in the last three years. In 2019, IDC noted a substantial rise in investments into RPA and intelligent automation companies and start-ups in China. IDC believes that automation may also be viewed as a pre-emptive action considering the future workforce – as there seems to be little to no inclination from younger talent to do mundane, repetitive tasks that can be easily executed with the help of technology.
RPA and intelligent automation benchmarks
- Institutions can achieve costs savings in the range of 30-60%. However, actual numbers would ultimately vary based on the cost base, the business process itself, the investments needed to support RPA and intelligent automation, and so forth.
- The implementation time required for RPA is short, usually ranging from 6 to 12 weeks. This is dependent on the type of task or process being automated.
- Early indicators point to a reduction of turnaround time by 60-90% on average.
- Increase accuracy rate to 100%.
Use cases
IDC also noted that significant investments from financial accounting, operation management, human resources, corporate banking, retail and consumer banking, credit cards, risk management, channel operations, and assets and liabilities management.
Kapoor adds, "COVID-19 will further accelerate the adoption of RPA and intelligent automation as many institutions are now looking at automation to offer business continuity and resiliency. Intelligent automation will be one of the key technologies that will propel institutions through digital transformation. "
She also foresees that institutions will invest significantly in automation to achieve business performance and scalability in these unprecedented times. "We also expect the deployments of RPA and intelligent automation in the cloud to substantially accelerate in China over the next few years to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), as well to offer usability, resiliency, agility, and scalability," concluded Kapoor.
Currently, institutions want to have the ability to make deployment model choices, as well as to achieve consistency in how these models enable how automation and AI solutions are built, tested, deployed, and managed.
