Key Themes

• Culture – One of the most prevalent themes within financial services this year, culture was highlighted as a key factor in delivering digital transformation. Organisations need to foster a culture where there is ongoing communication between the IT and business teams. This includes breaking down language barriers and allowing for risk and dialogue, following a top-down approach. In order to do this, firms must incorporate this into their business strategies and encourage a culture of open communication and innovation.
• The IA ‘Journey’ – Every organisation is at different points in maturity with their intelligent automation and digital roadmaps. Intelligent automation should not be seen as a ‘single technology journey’ but rather a set of ‘journeys’ within different business lines as they progress through various transformative stages. For example, some firms data business would fall under the ‘institutionalisation stage’ whereas in its clearing business, they may be only starting their journey (the initialisation stage). When starting off on one of their transformation journey’s, an FS firm must steer away from verticalisation and workflow fragmentation in order to develop a more holistic approach.
• Re-baselining ‘AI’ – The term ‘AI’ needs to be re-baselined. The research on AI goes back decades. As data sets increase, only then will we really start to see the application of machine learning and then ultimately, intelligent automation. In the interim, we will continue to see a drive towards NLP as more simple automation and semantic type data will be in machine readable and structured data format. This will lead to a reinvention of processes and reimagining them from the beginning.
• Transformative Ecosystems - Banks and financial institutions often struggle with deriving value and translating new technologies into day-to-day benefits. In order to transform organisations at different maturity levels, there needs to be an ecosystem in place to make it work around culture, attitudes, funding models and people. This involves measuring the value these new technologies bring and understanding what is the business case and problem you are trying to solve. Otherwise, if you do not measure, the potential benefits of the new technology becomes diluted. In order to do this, a measurement framework around a chosen ‘bubble’ needs to be created, for example, to reduce costs or improve agility, you’ll have to track how you measure them throughout the process, not just at the end.
• Target State - Custodians need service offerings and in order to become a trusted 3rd party intermediary, a significant infrastructure needs to be built. To add to this, banks and market infrastructure find it tough to get sign off for resources on digital projects. The challenges in this domain are complex but to overcome these, movement towards a state where NLP, AI and IA become ‘normal’ is necessary, if not the direction of travel already. The definitive actions FS firms can take is to control and monitor elements whereby automation adds a layer of audit. Compared to bots, it is not as useful in certain areas, for example when deciding to make a trade. The discussion around the orchestration layer aligned with the institutionalisation stage of the automation journey as it is intelligent enough to connect to various applications within one organisation. This enables the whole ecosystem to be connected via automation orchestrators so things work in an interconnected way.

Thank you to all those who attended our round table – we look forward to the next one!

For more information and to learn more about Synechron’s work with Intelligent Automation click here

To see our infographic on the growing Intelligent Automation market click here .