How Ikano Bank saved 300,000 hours with RPA … so far

Ikano Bank, started by the founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, is on a transformation journey to strengthen the Bank’s commercial relevance and be a leader in sustainable banking. One way to get there is through the strategic use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), to increase efficiency, enable paperless processes and improve the experience for both co-workers and customers. And of course, as always, we do it the Ikano Bank Way – with a people first approach.

Viktor T?rner is leading the Ikano Bank automation office and has been a part of the RPA-journey at Ikano Bank since the start in 2018. All the way from the first baby-steps to the well-oiled “automation factory” it is today.

“We had some local automation initiatives before, but at the end of 2018 we decided to really go for it. So, we formed a Centre of Excellence and chose UiPath as our automation platform”, says Viktor T?rner.

Early proof of success

What the automation team didn′t do, however, was to perform a massive pre-study with a mapping of all processes. Instead, they decided to start with low-hanging fruits, based on suggestions of process pain-points from fellow co-workers.?

“We actually managed to knock out 15 bots in the first six months, proving that robotic automation really works. And we made sure to involve the organisation from the start”, says Viktor.

One of the first truly successful automations was a digital onboarding process for IKEA loan customers in Poland. The business case was for 21,000 onboardings in two years, and the actual result… 106,000 onboarded customers!

An open-door policy

Since then, the automation office has been kept a small team but with an open-door policy. Over 60 virtual team members from different areas and markets participate in two weeks scrum sprints. An important key to success, says Viktor:

“It is a good approach, since we are not experts on all processes. But we can help in suggest changes and transfer knowledge within the Bank.”

Much more than costs saved

Organisation-wise the automation office is a part of Operations but works within the whole process landscape, from finance and compliance to IT development. In other words, wherever there is value from automation to be had.

Speaking of value, hours saved, and cost reductions are the traditional KPIs in RPA. But as Viktor points out the value of automation is much broader than that, such as refocusing skilled people from routine tasks, increase internal control and improving the customer experience through 24/7 operations, increased response time and less errors.

“It enables us to do things faster, but also to do things that wouldn’t be done at all, because they are too resource demanding. And it contributes to the Bank′s sustainability ambitions by enabling paperless processes and increase our financial sustainability.” Viktor concludes.

AI and citizen development

Today, the RPA journey continues, with more automations and exploration of new possibilities. AI and machine learning is one area of development, with e.g. conversational AI for customer service and AI-enabled document processing. Another is so called “Citizen development”, enabling co-workers to develop their own automation solutions to make work easier.

More about the RPA journey and results delivered so far

+ 200 Automations delivered and + 300,000 work hours saved

Top 2 favourite automations from 2022, according to the Automation team

1.Casper (named after a team member′s Labrador retriever)

Our watchdog automation, continuously checking the statuses of our other automations and taking action if needed. In our last sprint it took care of some 50 events that would otherwise have required intervention from the development team. Automation at its best!

2. Teambridge migration to Therefore

The goal with this project was to migrate tens of millions of documents from a legacy document management system (DMS) to our new Therefore platform. We ended up building a script-based automation that can export and keep logs of the status for each agreement. We saved tens of thousands of hours in manual work and supported the transformation, something we’re very proud of.