As the COVID-19 crisis continues to play out, the need for banks to transform digitally toward a new operating model. One that delivers a highly relevant customer experiences, provides easy access to innovation, and reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) without the burden of managing security and infrastructure.

Day-to-day, customers have become much more accustomed to instant action, engagement and information from their interactions with brands and as such, trends like banking as a service (BaaS), the rapid proliferation of fintech solutions and innovations suggests that the time is right to consider the potential for hyper-automation.

Coined by Gartner in 2019, hyper-automation is the full automation of the business processes and customer processes. It achieves this through an advanced ecosystem of operational and customer facing digital solutions that look to leverage the flexibility and scalability of modern IT infrastructure, which ultimately frees up staff to inject their creativity into delighting customers outside of said processes.

The automated business, combined with agile frameworks, provides opportunities for better-informed decision making, generated through a more holistic data picture throughout the organisation. Keeping the bulwark of infrastructure through state-of-art datacentres, BFSI is veering towards Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which is being enhanced and refined by technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), process mining, advanced analytics, blockchain and more, to reduce costs, maintain accuracy and speed up processes.

With new challengers flooding the market with cloud infrastructure and a mobile-first, digital proposition, the fight for market share among the BFSI players has intensified. This is what makes automation such a compelling proposition, as any opportunity to slim down the operational costs will be welcomed to drive increased profitability. From automating on-boarding processes in lending to improving data quality and utility for better decision making, hyper-automation has the potential to augment workers ability, whilst reducing operational costs and human error.