The Blue Prism report titled “RPA In The APAC Financial Services Sector” found that 47% of Hong Kong respondents indicated that their organisations currently use robotic process automation (RPA) solutions and technologies.
It was also found that a rapid local surge in adoption can be expected, with 31% of those that had not implemented RPA indicating plans to do so in the next six months – the highest rate among markets surveyed.
In terms of the top technologies used by financial organisations, Hong Kong respondents also had the highest adoption rate of predictive analytics at 70% compared to the 47% average across markets; machine learning was the second-most (63%) leveraged technology locally.
Another standout insight for the Hong Kong market was in how RPA was utilised. While Hong Kong respondents were aligned with other markets in indicating that their finance departments had the strongest adoption rates (79%), local respondents uniquely indicated high adoption rates in their customer service departments (71% versus 50% regional average) and their sales and marketing departments (59% versus 43% regional average).
The high expected adoption rate can be at least partially attributed to a strong local understanding of RPA, with 82% of Hong Kong business leaders indicating that they were “familiar” or “extremely familiar” with it.
When it came to the main drivers of RPA adoption, local organisations were the most likely (78%) among the markets surveyed to indicate wanting to empower workers to concentrate on higher-value tasks; increasing organisational efficiencies was another top reason (81%).
About 76% of Hong Kong respondents indicated that they thought the future growth of RPA to be “promising” or “extremely promising”. Interestingly 96% of RPA users felt that RPA had improved their business operations.
In terms of the benefits associated with RPA adoption, local organisations ranked cost and time savings (69%) as well as increased accuracy and quality of output (69%) as the most significant benefits.
That said, finding the right talent to manage RPA deployment and operations (59%) and identifying the right processes for RPA (54%) were indicated as the top challenges encountered by local business leaders in implementing RPA programmes.
This indicates that Hong Kong organisations may need to investigate working with third-party expertise to execute their innovation initiatives at speed.
Robert Dewar, vice president, financial services, APAC, Blue Prism, said: “The latest insights from this report show that we can expect to see a significant uptick in RPA and Intelligent Automation adoption among Hong Kong’s financial services institutions. This will position local organisations to make a strong post-pandemic recovery and improve their competitiveness in an increasingly crowded global market.”
