Federal Bank Partners with UiPath to Meet a Nearly Impossible Compliance Deadline

Federal Bank completed a ten-year period of high growth and expansion, a process that implied increased operations and compliance requirements.

It was facing an extremely challenging compliance deadline, which could take up to a year to meet with manual efforts. Partnering with UiPath helped Federal Bank keep costs low and hit the compliance deadline in half the time.

Federal Bank is a leading private sector bank headquartered in Kerala, India. In the last ten-year period, Federal Bank has experienced extremely aggressive growth rates, to the point where it now operates more than 1,250 branches throughout India.

 

While extremely positive, this explosive growth rate did lead to a few potential challenges, mainly related to keeping compliance requirements in step with business growth.

For example, Federal Bank faced a new regulatory requirement related to managing and merging unique customer identification codes (UCIC) in order to identify customers. Complying with this new mandate would be extremely time-consuming if the bank attempted to perform the needed data merges manually. At the same time, Federal Bank realized that if it continued to expand the business at the same pace that it was adding people, it could face challenges related to maintaining its cost-income ratio and other critical financial metrics.

Federal Bank has always been strategic in adopting technology to support growth and customer satisfaction. For example, it developed an internal theme related to an ongoing digital transformation effort, which was “digital at the fore, human at the core.” By this, the bank meant that it always wanted to be at the forefront of developing digital technologies to run the business, help employees, and serve its customers. At the same time, Federal Bank wanted to make sure that its branch employees were always empowered to provide warm customer support and other relationship-oriented services.

"We always look for new, better, and smarter ways to manage our entire business," said Shalini Warrier, Chief Operating Officer, Federal Bank. "These new situations led us to consider Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and we were confident automating many critical processes would help users reduce costs, improve data accuracy, and gain a scalable solution for future efficiencies for the entire company."

The decision to partner with UiPath

Roshni Majeed, Assistant Vice President and first RPA champion at Federal Bank, recalled how the process went from there—and how the bank ultimately selected UiPath. "We evaluated the top RPA vendors in the industry, especially the top three," she said. "Once we learned more about UiPath and the UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform, we were convinced about the way forward."

“We loved how easy it was to get started with UiPath, and the fact that they offered a free download for up to three months,” explained Majeed. “We were also impressed by the training resources available in the UiPath Academy as well as the entire customer services and support UiPath offered. All of this made it extremely easy for us to pick UiPath.”

UiPath helps Federal Bank hit a seemingly impossible compliance deadline

Once the decision was made, Federal Bank moved forward with an initial Proof of Concept (POC). The bank quickly realized that the UiPath Robots could help it with its urgent compliance challenge related to its UCIC process by automating vital data merge steps.

"It quickly became clear that we didn't have a lot of time to hit the compliance date," said Majeed. "Yet we also realized that if we attempted to perform all the necessary work manually, we were at risk of not hitting the deadline."

Federal Bank had larger customer groups organized by branch, but to try to break them down to a unique customer ID manually was going to be extremely time-consuming and challenging. "Early projections showed that this project was going to be so large that it could require as many as ten employees, and up to a year to complete," said Majeed.

Yet Federal Bank saw this challenge as an opportunity to see what the UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform could do and quickly used a UiPath Robot to complete the process for a small sample of 10,000 customer records. Where employees needed a full day to merge 200-300 records, the UiPath Robot demonstrated that it could merge 250 records in an hour and keep doing it on a 24-hour basis.

“The UiPath Robot helped automate this vital process and save significant amounts of time, effort, and budget while hitting the compliance deadline,” said Warrier. “The UiPath Robot helped us get it done in 50% of the time. We were able to get this important project done in six months as opposed to the year or more we first estimated, which helped deliver an impressive return on investment.” Clearly, the process was an early win for RPA at Federal Bank.

Paving the way for future successes

This first effort was hugely successful and helped the company plan to do even more with UiPath. Federal Bank is in the process of developing a small internal Center of Excellence (CoE) where IT and other team members can become more efficient in developing and deploying additional UiPath Robots.

For example, Federal Bank also succeeded in using UiPath to automate the task of merchant onboarding for BharatQR(BQR). BQR is used to facilitate merchant banking transfers in India. Previous BQR registration tasks required a human employee to spend up to seven minutes to manually complete the process. “The UiPath Robot has brought this time down to just one minute per transfer,” said Warrier. “That would have been unimaginable in a manual environment.”

Federal Bank has currently used UiPath to automate 15 tasks, but it has aggressive plans to automate a total of 53 tasks in the near future, especially in the area of account reconciliation and other similar processes. The company is continuously on the lookout for tasks that are repetitive or mundane--or those where they could free employees to focus on higher value work, such as spending more time with customers.

The future looks bright with UiPath

Federal Bank can now do things faster, more accurately, and more productively. They also see the future where they'll be able to get even more out of RPA by using it in conjunction with artificial intelligence. This will help IT and operations teams deliver the full power of RPA.

“We continue to evaluate new automation opportunities to become even more agile,” says Majeed. “We are confident our partnership with UiPath will help us find these opportunities and position our company for even more improvements in the future.”