Riyad Capital uses RPA to achieve impressive time savings on two business-critical processes

Riyad Capital, the leading investment services company deployed UiPath robots to automate two business-critical processes. Two software robots have helped the company achieve a massive combined time saving of over 20,000 working hours a year due to the high volume of transactions they now manage which used to be dealt with manually before.

Since its foundation in 2008, Riyad Capital has always aimed to become a trusted provider of sustainable and financially rewarding investment products whilst delivering superior customer service through highly skilled and engaged staff across an array of channels.

The company had two business-critical processes, which were consuming a huge amount of employee time and additional resource requirements to handle the spike in transaction volumes. These challenged Riyad Capital’s ability to increase the customer base and process a large volume of transactions. Furthermore, the team at Riyad Capital was under pressure to deliver tangible results to its business users in relation to these critical processes. Riyad Capital realized that they need to look at a holistic approach such as automation.

We decided that automation of these processes would help the company not only to accelerate the time to delivery but also to give back time to operational staff for more productive, higher-value tasks such as developing opportunities to grow the business.

Ahmed Al-Harbi • Chief Operating Officer at Riyad Capital

So Ahmed Al-Harbi brought in partners Protiviti to support them with use case validation, defining the business case, and end to solution design, development, and deployment. Protiviti is a global consulting firm with 85 offices worldwide and specialists in areas such as Digital Transformation, Intelligent Automation, Technology consulting, internal audits, risk and compliance, business processes, data analytics, and finance.

Following the business case presentation, the implementation team at Protiviti’s Riyad office performed an initial analysis of the two processes to be automated and proposed a suitable approach based on Riyad Capital’s need for quick delivery. The delivery of the project was based on an agile methodology to meet the short available timelines.

Thanks to the simplicity and user-friendliness of UiPath RPA and our on-ground Solution Design & Development expertise, we had a working solution ready within five weeks.

Shailesh Indapurkar • Managing Director, Protiviti Member Firm for the Middle East Region

Massive time savings

The first of the two processes to be automated was that of creating accounts on a broker platform in the US on behalf of customers. The operation team at Riyad Capital received daily requests from clients to open US-based accounts to enable trading in the US & FOREX Market.

Managing these requests involves a number of time-consuming and highly repetitive stages in the process, starting with the need to validate the customer’s data on the company’s LOB applications, verifying identities, and creating the trading account in the US, through to sending the required documents to the US broker platform for verification, and finally notifying the client that the process has been completed and updated on Riyad Capital’s system as well.

The automation is a fully unattended RPA solution based on UiPath Studio, UiPath Orchestrator and two Unattended bots. To achieve enhanced benefits, RPA was combined with Protiviti’s custom-made Machine-Learning solution, to automate all UI interactions and manage document extraction and validation 24 hours a day with ‘Human-in-the-Loop’.

We were extremely happy and surprised with the results as we were able to reduce the number of FTEs required for the process. The software robot has reduced turnaround times by 67% and improved overall the customer onboarding process.

Ahmed Al-Harbi • Chief Operating Officer at Riyad Capital

This decrease in turnaround times and the time-saving in man-hours has meant that staff is now free to process almost twenty times more client requests. Not only that but all requests are now processed free of errors and on time regardless of the volume of requests, with a log register and audit trail that enables easy monitoring for compliance.

The second process selected to be automated using UiPath RPA was also created to help Riyad Capital ensure compliance with the Saudi Capital Market Authority (CMA). The operation team received an average of around 3,500 judicial orders daily on the Nafith platform launched in 2020 by the Capital Market Authority and allows individuals and corporations to securely create, save and manage enforcement instruments, including promissory notes.

The automation solution needed to integrate over five different business applications and be flexible enough to run multiple independent work packages. Furthermore, 9 out of 10 CMA requests had to be checked manually, as well as customers often not being easily identifiable in different databases.

When deployed, the UiPath RPA solution reduced the manual checking times by a factor of fourteen, from around 1024 hours a month to slightly over 73 hours a month – based on the 76,500 CMA requests received monthly by the business. This equates to 11,400 hours saved a year and when combined with the time saved through the automation of the US broker account creation process, means that Riyad Capital is now able to reallocate staff time to do more productive higher-value tasks.

A roadmap for the future

The positive experience and the savings in FTEs so far with UiPath RPA mean that there is no doubt in Riyad Capital about the potential the automation technology has as one of the key enablers for Business Process Transformation. So in the immediate short term, Riyad Capital’s plan is to build greater resilience into the already existing processes.

In the longer term, the RPA roadmap will involve further process discovery to define and determine additional processes that can and should be automated. Starting with the internal sharing of business process descriptions so that the team can decide which processes would be right for automation and then the creation of a pipeline for RPA opportunities within the organization.