By Harel Tayeb, CEO, Kryon

We are all familiar with the digital transformation story in some way, shape or form. There is now a general understanding across industries about how digitisation benefits varying sectors, companies and stakeholders over the long-term. The race is now on to see who can digitise successfully – first.

Ultimately, digital transformation is about future-proofing organisations so that in the face of disruption, be it a pandemic, climate change, changes in consumer habits, staff shortages, remote working and the like; products are still bought and people are serviced.

This is particularly apt for the financial sector. Finance leaders now see digital transformation as the way for financial institutions to future-proof their businesses and this will be especially true in 2022 – and we’re about to tell you why.

#1 All citizens rise to the challenge

Gartner defines citizen developers as “an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units.”[1]

The idea of a citizen developer really took hold in 2020 when remote working encouraged a rush towards digital transformation. But as a result, it also provided a new opportunity for companies to be competitive. Empowering non-IT employees by providing access to a far less technical coding alternative, to create enterprise apps, feels like something that should have existed a long time ago. Well it didn’t then but it does now, and everyone is trying to get in on the act.

In 2022, expect to see a steady rise in the presence of citizen developers in finance departments and within financial institutions. Their role will become staple but perhaps not in the way that we might expect. Time won’t be spent building automation, the bots will do that job. Employees are likely to have a bot that will identify and select workflows to be automated but those instructions will come from the citizen developers within teams. In finance, this means freeing up time for more advantageous accounting.

This allows finance teams and institutions to focus on delivering that all important digital-centric experience for clients while also staying on top of ever-changing compliance frameworks and regulations.

#2 Presenting the bots

Over the last few years we have seen Robotic Process Automation (RPA) become a major part of banking activities and procedures. RPA plays a fundamental role in accelerating productivity by automating the back office for a more organised and streamlined customer-facing front end.

In 2022, we will see banks and insurers take it one step further in the move to workforce efficiency. Each employee will benefit from an automated personal assistant or bot that will support the organisation of individual workflows. They do this by automatically learning from previous mistakes and remediating them. This will truly have an impact on the wider business, bolstering employee value and making automation a ‘must have’ for staff. With a clear view of how they are managing their days, staff can lean on automation to rethink process heavy, time consuming manual work, allowing them to focus on more critical responsibilities.

Personal bots are designed to target manually-intensive processes, such as procure-to-pay, order-to-cash and record-to-report. RPA is used by CFOs to retrieve budget approval, grow revenues deflated by errors, incorporate mergers, manage talent and adhere to compliance requirements. With RPA, monotonous tasks are programmed, saving employee time for the analytical tasks, keeping finance teams more productive.

#3 Automating the automation

The introduction of personal bots will essentially be the crux of automating automation, or end-to-end automation. Finance teams are consumed by a deluge of complicated, day-to-day processes that can be alleviated with programming, and self-remediation – where the bots undertake the programming. The myriad of costly, repetitive processes that prevent financial organisations from meeting growth and profit targets can be shifted to a virtual workforce, unburdening employees. This will be the epitome of successful automation in coming years, increasing the scalability of projects and redressing business agility.

In order to get this right in 2022, finance teams, banks, mortgage brokers, insurers, credit unions etc. must go through a process of discovery ahead of implementation. Investing time tapping into experts and finding the right resources will be an important part of the decision making process. It is also essential that businesses have a clear overview of the business processes to understand where the needs are for automation.

Having that understanding of automation enables businesses to reap huge benefits of new efficiencies. For example, implementation time for RPA projects can be cut by up to 80% when using an end-to-end automation solution. In addition, unattended RPA is able to automate 75% more processes and reduce the resources required to scale automation, yielding an ROI of up to 352%.

If done right, re-inventing the way we handle granular details, will not only have the ability to change business trajectories but also, augment human intelligence and the role we play within organisations. A role destined to be far more dynamic and transformational than inputting data into spreadsheets.

[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/citizen-developer