The value of assets under management (AUM) globally has been increasing, by about 9% per annum over the past 5 years
However, the operating costs are at an all-time high due to multiple factors – including the regulatory burden, many manual processes, and the imperative to innovate to meet evolving customer needs.
There is, therefore, a renewed imperative to implement a digital operating model that enables efficient and safe growth. This represents a major change for the industry, which has been relatively slow to embrace digital. Firms will need to apply multiple levers: large-scale technology changes and rationalization, developing next-generation data architectures, and changing business and operating models.
Many Asset managers and Asset servicers continue to explore such options but can become frustrated or be held back by resource constraints, the time required, and the high costs associated with achieving desired benefits.
In that regard, Intelligent automation offers an attractive complementary response, a new strategic capability that augments more traditional levers. It can help firms move the operational efficiency dial quickly and deliver a good return on investment while freeing resources and capacity to embark on strategic programs. Leading Asset managers and Asset servicers are achieving multiple benefits – not just cost savings, but also capacity creation, risk reduction, improved client experience, and enhanced employee engagement, amongst others.
Intelligent automation is a multi-faceted concept and toolbox, which involves automating end-to-end processes intelligently using the right blend of automation technologies, such as robotic process automation (RPA), digital forms, optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR), workflows, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to achieve the desired organizational objectives.
Another key aspect of intelligent automation is that all these different automation tools are catalysts for standardization. They should be implemented with a “light touch” lean approach to optimize and streamline processes and gain simplification benefits.
In that regard, you don’t need heavy multi-year transformation to provide you the benefits and through automation, start getting these benefits within couple of weeks of investments. Intelligent Automation can be applied to many processes and some of the most recent examples we have seen that Asset Managers and Servicers are leveraging include: