Robots have got OCBC’s retail banking backend covered
We are programmed just to do, anything you want us to, we are the robots
Hey humans! Feeling down? Well let’s get down some more. OCBC Bank has launched two robots to enhance internal backend processing speeds in its retail banking secured lending (CSL) and finance teams.
The robot attached to the CSL team assists with housing loan re-pricing. This includes processing time, which “has been almost entirely reduced” (i.e. 97% reduction in processing time).
The bank says a staff member previously had to execute 199 process steps, toggle across five systems and 27 screens, to process one housing loan re-pricing application. (They must have been bored out of their minds.)
The infinitely superior robot can process more than 100 re-pricing applications a day. What used to take staff more than 45 minutes to complete, now takes the robot one minute to complete. Can a robot look smug? That might be happening now.
The robot checks on customers’ eligibility to re-price, recommends appropriate re-pricing options, and drafts the recommendation email for customer. All this means quicker responses.
Meanwhile, the robot attached to the finance section assists with sales performance reporting. OCBC says sales reports were previously generated manually by a staff member, and to prepare a report, it requires 166 work steps across multiple spreadsheets.
In addition, staff used to spend 120 mins preparing the report, but it is now generated in 12 minutes by the robot. The bank says management is now able to receive the report “promptly” at 9am, instead of at 4pm daily (“enabling management to make more effective daily decisions”).
OCBC should have given the robots cute names. How about Nola for the loan team and Nancy for the finance team?
UPDATE (23 November): OCBC contacted Banking Technology to tell us the robots are called Bob and Zac.
