NIBC engages business stakeholders and employees in its automation journey with UiPath RPA

When the team responsible for analyzing and defining process improvements at Dutch bank NIBC decided to embark on an automation journey using the UiPath Business Automation Platform, they were very clear from the start that the program’s success depended not only on full support from different business sponsors within the organization, but also the engagement and participation of the very employees that robotization would have an impact on.

NIBC is an entrepreneurial bank. That core value drives the way it has been doing business for years. It focuses on bespoke corporate and retail financial solutions as well as building client relations in proven sectors in North Western Europe, where the bank can leverage its expertise whilst maintaining a lean organization with disciplined cost control.

As part of this lean strategy, the bank embarked on an automation journey five years ago that had the support and interest of business sponsors across the enterprise from the start, ensuring that it quickly achieved a forward momentum that has helped the bank modernize as much as possible the way of working and improving many routine, mundane jobs that still existed within the organization.

“Many activities were being done manually and we wanted to look at how we could do things differently,” says Jelle van Munster, Automation Lead at NIBC, who was responsible for analyzing and defining process architecture and process improvements. “We wanted not to just optimize processes but also to automate them”.

To achieve this, Jelle and his team worked directly with all business units across the entire enterprise during the task of discovering processes that made a sound business case for automation. Various departments were engaged and participated in the discussions and brainstorming about both the opportunities and the risks that these new technological advances presented and what the impact would be on the bank as a whole.

This collaborative effort helped lead to the creation of the idea regarding the processes that could be automated and the authorization to begin development. Several vendors were evaluated during this first stage and case study examples of how other banks that are using RPA in their organization were also reviewed.

We chose UiPath RPA platform for a number of reasons including its user friendliness and intuitive user interface, as well its security guarantees and competitive cost.

Jelle van Munster • Automation Lead at NIBC

Jelle joined forces with Ciphix, the Rotterdam-based automation expert and UiPath Diamond Partner in the region, in order to create a proof-of-concept. Three key processes were chosen for the initial pilot, sponsored by the IT, HR and Operations departments. By May of 2019 two robots were already live. One, named Cassey, was for automating the process of managing loans in the Operations department and the second one, named George, and which is still live today 3 years later, was designed to automate the onboarding of external employees for the Human Resources unit.

In both cases, the success of these RPA deployments was shared across the organization and Jelle began to secure more interest from other departments who in turn sent some of their managers as departmental representatives to internal events and organized visits, in order to see for themselves what others were doing with RPA in their business units.

Today, NIBC has 11 unattended robots performing 23 processes across a broad variety of departments, although neither the Treasury nor the Finance department have one in operation yet but the latter is planning to do so in the future. For Jelle, the best-in-class example is a robot created for the Retail banking department which automates the screening and the account opening process for new savings customers, while some parts of the process are still picked up by the bank’s employees.

By Jelle’s calculation, building the robots takes an average of 1 ½ - 2 months (although the fastest time was 3 days). In NIBC, it’s been easy enough to create a positive business case for RPA and secure the support and sponsorship of departmental management to cost out the development of the bots.

RPA makes people reevaluate their jobs, and once they see how it works for them, and benefits their work situation, any resistance to change they might have had soon disappears.

Jelle van Munster • Automation Lead at NIBC

Furthermore, they become empowered once software robots relieve them of the time-consuming and monotonous tasks they were doing before automation, to the extent that they don’t only have more time for more productive activities but also are inspired to learn how to automate and suggest new processes for robotization.

This was the main objective behind the automation program for NIBC, and for the creation of the RPA bots. It wasn’t just about reducing costs, it was much more to do with using technology to generate efficiencies and improvements in the staff’s happiness at work which in turn would translate into better customer service and increased client satisfaction. One of the bank’s stated strategic priorities is “We continue to invest in our people, culture and innovation to ensure that we stay ahead of the curve and deliver the best possible experience to our clients”.

This strategy applies across numerous different areas of the bank’s operations, but within the context of the deployment of software robots of course, this means engaging with employees and allowing them to actively participate in the automation journey, by offering opportunities to train up in robot development and bring forward suggestions for the automation of processes that they know better than anyone else in the organization.

To support the journey and accelerate further robot development in order to clear some of the backlog of processes waiting for automation, NIBC now has its own Center of Excellence—an Automation Team of six people that combines internal employees with the external team at Ciphix and is not only dedicated to assisting in the creation and deployment of rules-based unattended robots across the organization, but also focused on adding new emerging technologies that can offer new opportunities and new value propositions to the bank.

We are constantly working on strengthening our toolkit to provide intelligent solutions across the bank. This is the best way to obtain the main objective we want to achieve: happier employees and as a result, of course, to have satisfied customers.

Jelle van Munster • Automation Lead at NIBC

For example, Jelle and his team sees the value of using UiPath RPA solution growing exponentially by linking it to OCR solutions or natural language processing, amongst others. Other tools like digital passport recognition for customer onboarding are already readily available in the cloud and waiting for integration.

NIBC Bank has also been exploring automated process discovery, and they will keep adding intelligence in their automation solutions.

In the future, it will help us to develop more complex automation solutions and make them available within our production environment combined with the process automation through RPA. That’s really something we are looking forward to.

Jelle van Munster • Automation Lead at NIBC