Automation is fulfilling its promise of transforming time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive processes into seamless and efficient operations.  

This year, automation maintained the spotlight as banks applied it to many different parts of their business.  

For example, understanding customer behavior and rooting out product issues no longer needs to take forever: Customer analytics firm FullStory has “helped clients find anything from millions to tens-of-millions in conversion opportunities, or lost customers through churn, or in costs for engineering and development,” Kirsten Newbold-Knipp told Insights Distilled. Finicity, a financial data aggregation firm owned by Mastercard, increased its funnel conversions by 15% and reduced its ticket resolution time by 80% using FullStory.    

Banks have also focused on using AI-powered digital assistants to beef up their customer service, since they can handle basic queries and give human agents more time to tackle complicated tasks. Many FinServs have leaned on technology partners to launch sophisticated chatbots, faster. For example, Kasisto counts WestPac, JPMorgan Chase, Standard Chartered, and TD as customers, Amazon Lex has hooked Truist, and Personetics powers tools for US Bank, Ally, and Santander. 

Trade finance document review has also been an area ripe for automation: JPMorgan used Cleareye.ai to “massively improve efficiency” and slash the time it takes to review documents from three hours down to ten minutes, while Deutsche Bank partnered with Traydstream, which can drive a ~60% cost reduction over human document processing.  

Finally, KeyBank has turned to fraud-fighting fintech Quavo to both increase its efficiency and reduce its losses. “We anticipate our back-office hand-offs and processes will reduce in half while improving chargeback effectiveness,” a KeyBank spokesperson told Insights Distilled, adding that Quavo’s platform “takes out errors and manual processes, giving us capacity to provide more support to our clients and dispute investigations.”