Robotics in Banking – What next?

Robotics is per se an approach to automate processing by teaching systems to do their job according to predefined rules and movements. 

In banking this approach came up for automated portfolio management and also was introduced to let systems automate updates of offer systems based on predefined inputs or investigations to automate processes.

Roboadvisor

The most known Robotics are the roboadvisors. These tools are based on the predefined rules of the client to search and update the own portfolio according to the risk profile and market trends, which are involved in this. Depending on the bank this automated processing is again based on funds or funds of funds, ETFs or even individual equities or even derivatives to be automatically or semi-automatically booked into your portfolio. 

In this way, they are some sort of competitions of own asset management products, which are (actively) managed by a fund manager to run a similar or better performance. 

Robots for processing

Not so much known, but quite often as well are robotics in operations. Here the robots check regularly positions or bookings and compare it with the wished state, like for reconciliation or risk management. Based on the investigations, they might initiate further processing or even try to address specific issues to the relevant departments for follow up. 

On the other side, robots also help to synchronize different systems or even steer other applications with the updates from the client given via various channels.

In some banks the robots are even used already in discussions with users to extract necessary information from the customer to automatically derive a customer transaction from the conversation. 

Robots and AI

The next step is to give these automated robots a more sophisticated base for decisions. Therefore, the combination with artificial intelligence and big data deep learning approaches makes these robots not just a predefined automated executor but even help to increase their own intelligence and make their decision based on a more sophisticated analyse and decision. With this they can even increase their capabilities and might learn further processing then not just initiate or be the start of an investigation. 

This is some step further into humanized interaction.

Happy to discuss my thoughts.