With COVID-19 rampaging across all walks of life, the digitalized, contactless online financial services in banks have become particularly important, which makes the digital transformation an overriding trend in the banking sector.

Against the backdrop of the pandemic, Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank has started to improve and reinforce its all-around automated management for its mid- and back-office businesses based on streamlined processes in a professional way. Cyclone Robotics, as the backbone to support the bank's use of RPA to drive the digital transformation in its mid- and back-office businesses, has helped optimize its cumbersome processes in an effort to boost business efficiency, eliminate duplicate work, and save labor and time costs. Through these measures, the bank has expanded its businesses, reached out to a wider target audience, and elevated its operation and management levels

Business pain points

In many departments of Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank, the data needs to be processed across systems. However, due to its large volume, and high requirements in accuracy and timeliness, the staff has to take quite a lot of time and energy to process it.

Data reporting through YIQITONG in the Account Management Department: The business personnel needs to manually process about 40 batches of account data with the status of Not Uploaded in the account management system every working day, with 3-10 minutes on average consumed for each. They have to spent almost the whole day on this project, while taking extra time for manual review and verification.

Invoice ticking and verification the Planning and Finance Department: The business personnel completes the invoice ticking and verification once per quarter. They have to manually log in to the Jiangsu VAT Invoice Platform to tick and submit the invoices one by one. Since a large quantity of invoices (~2,000 pieces) are involved, which takes up much time to process (1 min/piece), human errors may be likely to occur due to repetitive work, and its timeliness for reporting may be compromised.

Pooling of wealth management funds in the Retail Department: Two types of funds need to be pooled, that is, the funds from the products with expected gains, Youxiang and net worth products; and the funds from the Tiantianxiang product. The business personnel needs to download thousands of batches of data from multiple statements in the comprehensive wealth management platform and summarize them every working day. With the high requirements in data accuracy and timeliness, such task may take up too much time and energy, to complete and also is prone to errors.

Data reporting to PBOC in the Operation and Management Department: The business personnel are required to manually complete an average of 200 data reporting tasks around the clock every working day, which features repetitiveness and a high requirement in timeliness.

Introducing Cyclone RPA

The Cyclone RPA intelligent automation platform can work on various software systems and automatically execute business processes as specified by rules by simulating human behaviors, helping Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank automate the mid- and back-end businesses and optimize the human resource allocation. The platform targets the core scenarios in multiple processes to accelerate the intelligence transformation in business. With the platform in place, the business personnel can be inspired to work more enthusiastically to push the digital and automated transformation to a higher level.

In the Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank project, Cyclone Robotics successfully automated the five business processes including the data reporting through YIQITONG, invoice ticking and verification, pooling of the wealth management funds, account information reporting to PBOC, and retail business measurement reports, thus addressing the challenges in the daily work of the business personnel in  the Operations Management Department, Retail Department, and Planning and Finance Department.

Let's take a look at the data reporting through YIQITONG in the Account Management Department. When the counter staff in the branch office of the bank deals with the account transactions through the core system and the counter system, the basic account information will be synced to the account management system where the business personnel in the Operation Management Department will verify such information, and save it as a photocopied file into a zip package, and manually start the robot. The RPA robot automatically logs in to the account management system, and download the zip files with the status of Not Uploaded one by one, which contains the photocopied account information. Then it logs in to the YIQITONG system to upload the files, and generates the list of results for registering. In case of failure in uploading, it will record the exception message from the system. As a result, business processing time is halved, and duplicate work is removed, and the productivity is increased.

Similar streamlined processes can also be seen in the Retail Department. Pooling of the wealth management funds  in the Retail Department of the bank follows the standard rules, which involves data operations across systems like the comprehensive wealth management platform, OA systems and more. Through the Cyclone RPA automation, this process can be completed within 3 minutes, which would otherwise be done within 30 minutes by human labor. Imagine the pooling of funds from the products with expected gains, Youxiang and net worth products. The business  personnel manually converts the wealth management product release notice provided by the Asset Management Department into Excel, sends it to the RPA mailbox, and then manually triggers the RPA robot. The robot logs in to the comprehensive wealth management platform to download the breakdown of wealth management products. Then it filter and calculate the data from the downloaded table, and produce the Wealth Management Funds Pooling Table. Such a streamlined process not only ensures the timeliness and accuracy of data, but also greatly saves labor and time costs.

As the next step, the Cyclone RPA intelligent automation platform will continue to work with advanced technologies like Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Big Data, etc. to connect the platform, devices, systems, and humans together in an organic way, laying a solid foundation for the future financial technology ecosystem construction in the Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank.