TreasuryONE leverages RPA to deliver world-class treasury services

Enterprises worldwide apply lean management principles to improve costs, attract customers and engage employees. However, macro-economic conditions continue to clamp down on margins and impair business growth. Robotic process automation (RPA) leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities (bots) to manage high-volume, data-intensive and repetitive tasks to rectify this.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 40% of large enterprises will have deployed an increased number of RPA software bots compared to the current market scenario.

Recently, Automation Anywhere helped its client, TreasuryONE, a leading treasury outsourcer, to leverage RPA to deliver premier treasury services at scale, with a combination of consumer-like usability and enterprise-class reliability built into the latter’s program. The result? An empowered workforce that could automate work on its own, and in real-time, shares Rudolph Janse van Rensburg, Head of Technology and Director, TreasuryONE, in the edited excerpt below:

1. Briefly introduce your company, TreasuryONE.

TreasuryONE was established in May 2000. The company's mission is to provide a broad range of best-practice treasury services and technology to organisations of all sizes and levels of complexity. Offerings are fully scalable, so that the client enjoys the benefit of expert, cost-effective advice and execution, without paying for unnecessary staff and system overheads in the specialist field of treasury.

TreasuryONE’s product offerings include the delivery and support of treasury management technology systems, RPA systems, foreign exchange-rate risk management and execution services, offshore investment transfers, outsourced treasury management operations, investment management, best-practice treasury consulting services and financial instrument valuation. 

2. Describe some of the reasons why you opted for automation.

RPA is now among one of the fastest-growing technologies worldwide, and by 2020, 40% of large enterprises will have deployed RPA software, according to Gartner.

Successful organisations are actively using (RPA), which allows them to conduct outsourced activities in-house at economical rates, thus forcing traditional outsourcing firms to provide commodity services at lower prices.

To remain aligned with growing customer requirements while maintaining a competitive edge, we realised that we needed to automate several repetitive business processes to provide agility and scale. This would, in the long run, help us respond to the ongoing disruption occurring in the treasury services industry.

By empowering our human workforce to focus on what we are exceptionally good at, such as building relationships and adding value through our judgment and creativity, while allowing bots to do the rest, we believed we would be creating a future of differentiation where quality, along with price, would set us apart from the competition.

Also, as an organisational strategy, RPA would help our workforce to focus on building and nurturing customer relationships more effectively. 

3. Why did you choose Automation Anywhere for your RPA goals?

Our vision at TreasuryONE is to take the robot out of the human, and liberate employees from mundane, repetitive tasks, thus granting them more time to use their intellect and creativity to solve higher-order business challenges.  

On the other hand, Automation Anywhere has made a mission of enabling companies to operate with unprecedented productivity and efficiency by automating any part of the enterprise that can be automated with the most intelligent and intuitive RPA platform they call the “Intelligent Digital Workforce”. 

In our quest to identify a partner to automate as much as possible, Automation Anywhere seemed to be the best fit. Automation Anywhere would help us focus on things that only humans can do, such as building relationships and adding value through our judgment and creativity. This would help us differentiate ourselves from transactional or workforce outsourcers that compete on price alone.

4. Tell us about the business/process that was automated.

In spite of the latest technologies and a highly skilled workforce, our back-office transactions were time-consuming, thus delaying responsiveness and hindering customer relationships and, as with most manual tasks, the risk of errors and anomalies of human judgment are higher. 

We leveraged automation to help eliminate repetitive manual aspects of back-office operations, including performing settlements and sending out deal confirmations. This allowed our workers to focus more on customer relationships, while it enabled TreasuryONE to scale its business fast to stay on top of the market.

5. What were the steps/activities you followed to automate your process? How many processes are automated to date and how long did it take?

We wanted to maintain tight control of all our RPA deployments, so we built a COE (Center of Excellence) first and automated subsequent processes one step at a time. Within five months, we had completely automated four critical business processes, reducing errors to zero. 

We focused on automating all the tasks that give our employees greater freedom to contribute value to the organisation by focusing on exceptional customer service and reliable support.

6. Tell us about the security and compliance measures in your automation.

RPA works the way people do – it has the potential to touch every enterprise application such as CRM and ERP, for instance, and also the confidential personal and customer data within them. The cost of a security incident can be tremendous.

Therefore, at TreasuryONE, security is ingrained within every aspect of our Digital Workforce Platform. This covers the security of data, credentials and the ability to enforce fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC) at scale. Our RPA is engineered with built-in security to help us meet the most rigorous governance, trust and compliance requirements.

7. What benefits did you achieve from automation?

• We reduced the number of processing minutes/hours before and after automation. Now we can refocus 70 weekly hours on customer satisfaction.
• With regard to employee satisfaction and other benefits, we achieved 100% reduction in manual processing errors.

8. Do you think these bots will replace people?

Today, an estimated 80% to 90% of organisations continue to manually extract data from documents and e-mails. But, with advanced AI capacities, this is set to change. RPA bots are designed to free up users around the world from the mundane task of entering data into enterprise applications.

The automation of such complex, repetitive tasks liberates people to focus on what humans do best – innovate, collaborate and use their talent to solve business challenges.

In short, we want bots to do the heavy lifting, not to replace people. We let the bots do the work that bots are good at, and let people focus on where they excel, ie, building relationships and providing better service to clients.

9. What advice would you give to others who are initiating RPA automation programmes?

Almost everyone now uses a laptop for work – and we all had to learn how to use computers effectively in order to do our jobs. In the same way, from a skillset point of view, each of us must now learn to work with bots to improve work outcomes. Working with a partner that has walked the road of RPA would be a key piece of advice. The value you gain out of the lessons learned as well as the increased speed of implementation makes the investment a no-brainer.

Today, data is a big part of business processes, and we have so much data that we need to not only digitise, but also operationalise. Organisations thus need to change their mindset and be ready to automate anything that can be automated – that will help them focus and deliver more knowledge work. Analysis has shown that automation creates better products, services, systems and delivers things that were not possible until now. Automation allows organisations to innovate, execute and evolve, to remain competitive in a changing business environment.

In summary

In the coming years, we see the next wave of RPA virtually impacting every single vertical and every single process, including but not limited to finance and accounting, HR and customer service. Businesses that have already deployed RPA will begin to notice promising automation opportunities almost everywhere they look.

Mindless and repetitive tasks will soon be completely automated, thus allowing human workers to upskill and strategise about business growth and focus on making existing business processes smarter and smoother. The notion of a “digital workforce” to augment the human workforce will no longer be a concept; it will become a widespread reality. We will successfully enter the era of the bot-enabled human.