With over 20 years of experience in the Information Technology spectre, Ranjith is a passionate programmer, learner, mentor, and inspiring leader. He has worked on different cutting-edge technologies, domains, and applications receptive across the devices and poses extensive work experience in finance workflow automation, predictive data analysis in the finance domain including Equity, Mutual Fund, and Insurance. He played pivotal roles in building user-friendly digital platforms that resulted in ease for users from a usability and process perspective.
As we head out of 2020 and into 2021 – one thing we have realized is the importance of automation and the internet to our lives. From running businesses to meeting friends to attending schools and collages – the world of commerce ran on video calls and software that enable teams and organizations to interact with one another despite the global pandemic that has affected more than 73 million people across the world.
Technology has enabled us to manage our tasks and eventually the overall business smoothly – imagine a world without the internet or without the ever-dependable Microsoft teams or Zoom – how would we have managed and coordinated? How would companies have run? Truly the world would have come to a grinding halt – if not for technology and automation in the communications space.
Reasons for Automation
One of the most important reasons for automation is to make technology do the work that takes efforts and time of human. The manufacturing sector is a prime example of this, where machines accomplish in minutes what a human would have in days. In fields like mining etc. automation and the use of robotics and AI has almost become second nature to the industry.
Another reason for automation is speed. Machines work a lot faster than Man and are not prone to fatigue – either of body or of mind. They can work at a super quick speed and accomplish tasks a lot faster and more neatly and efficiently than Man.
The reason that the financial service industry goes in for automation is of course speed but also to eliminate human error – again through oversight or fatigue, when it comes to numbers there can be no errors in terms of reporting – hence speed and accuracy are both needed.
Banks and Stock Markets the world over have been one of the first to embrace technology and automation wherein millions of trades are executed in a matter of minutes – a feat that is possible only through automation.
Automating Financial Processes
There are 5 distinct advantages of automation in financial processes, they are:
- Saving time: Finance processes like document submission, verification etc. are tedious and often time consuming – not to mention paper consuming and harmful to the environment. Automation allows us to move faster and reduce the turnaround time for most projects. Take KYC as an example – eKYC has made it so much simpler to upload documents and complete the process rather than taking photocopies and visiting branches multiple times. It is equally easy to fetch these KYCs in no time and go ahead with on-boarding of clients or facilitating transaction.
- Tightening Processes: Financial processes are often complex and require a series of approvals and compliance to various rules. Again, paperwork becomes tedious and slow, automation makes the process faster
- High Volume: Technology, if properly in place can take care of large volumes without any hindrance. Any high-volume tasks move much faster as a result of automation – be it the daily transactional processes of banks, stock exchanges, mutual funds etc.
- Reducing Manual Errors: Automation helps us reduce errors as through Artificial Intelligence (AI) the system can be developed to spot errors and rectify them at that point itself without wasting too much time. This ensures that the final data set is accurate and mostly free from all errors.
- Data Integrity: All data can be encrypted, stored safely and can also be decrypted and easily retrieved later with the help of innovation. With proper data security in place, the chances of that data being misplaced or misused are very rare.
Given the above advantages – automation in the financial space is changing the way we transact, the way we invest in mutual funds and otherwise, the way we shop and pay online and the way we send money to friends and loved ones.
Regulators like RBI, SEBI, IRDA etc also support automation of processes and I can only foresee more and more automation in the financial sector, making the life of the end investor and different stakeholders much easier and leaving them to focus on other tasks.