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.

Survey Findings At-A-Glance

The information graphic showcases the extensive survey findings at a high level:

• Four key observations from our 302 survey respondents.

• Three steps to help firms jumpstart their business process automation efforts.

To learn more, read our whitepaper “Financial Services Automation: Taking Off The Training Wheels,” visit the Banking & Financial Services and Intelligent Process Automation sections of our website, or contact us.