Our recent study of 302 executives from financial services firms throughout North America sheds light on the state of their business process automation efforts. For example:
Most respondents agree that automation is critical to their business over the long term.
Automation initiatives still appear to be in their infancy; both robotic process automation (RPA) and cognitive automation remain on a slow but steady climb.
Automation initiatives are under-resourced, don’t fully address security concerns and regulatory mandates, and lack a post-deployment bot roadmap.
Roughly half of respondents confess a lack of sufficient internal expertise.
A lack of strategic focus is evident due in part to the absence of enterprise-wide approaches built around automation centers of excellence (CoE).
Automation initiatives are steered primarily by IT, which means that they are treated as a technology-centric effort. Many respondents are struggling to gain business unit involvement and process change expertise, despite business leaders’ higher levels of optimism for automation benefits vis-à-vis IT leaders.
On the whole, there appears to be limited realization of automation’s benefits; less than one-tenth of respondents identify themselves as beneficiaries.
Among the top adoption challenges are use case determination and strategy development and deployment.
