Today, automation in the finance industry isn’t only about online insurance payments or invoice automation. It leverages the capacity of artificial intelligence and extensive integrations to handle big data, provide five-star customer support, and deliver personalized notices.
The use of automation to optimize offline communications is gaining particular popularity. By integrating advanced CRM systems with mail automation software, financial services can automatically print and deliver personalized notifications and documents.
To learn more about automating customer communication in the finance industry for banks, insurers, and mortgage lenders, read on:
- Main trends and approaches to automation in the finance industry
- Billing, notices, and invoice automation for banks, insurers, and mortgage lenders
Main Trends and Approaches to Automation in the Finance Industry
The financial sector is heavily based on hundreds of routine and repetitive processes. To handle a customer request, provide a credit card, process a purchase order, or complete any other operation, financial institutions do the same things over and over.
Starting from the first ATM designed in the 60ies, financial services are striving to automate as much as possible. Fortunately, with technology advancement, the pace of automation in the finance industry has significantly accelerated. Nowadays, there are multiple automation approaches that can add to your company’s bottom line:
- Online insurance payments. Online insurance payments can be processed both through a third-party payment service or an internal platform of an insurer. Such software partially automates the payment process, enabling consumers to manage their contributions and avoid late payments. On the flip side, thanks to online insurance payments, insurers can reduce manual work and free their staff for more critical tasks.
- Automatic payments and billing. With this type of automation in the finance industry, consumers can choose to automatically pay recurring bills on a scheduled date. Similarly to online insurance payments, automatic billing is equally beneficial to payers and financial institutions.
- Invoice automation. Invoice automation is a part of an AP automation strategy that optimizes invoice processing lead time. It helps businesses and financial services to render, process, deliver, and track invoices. Invoice automation also works for paper invoices that can be automatically printed and shipped to the right person.
- Automated customer experiences. Robotic process automation (RPA) can cover almost all stages of the customer journey, including account onboarding, maintenance, and closing. RPA solutions don’t require coding skills or deep technical expertise. Thus, any financial organization can easily launch such software to optimize the collection, validation, and transfer of information.
- Anti-laundering and customer analysis. Finance services spend crazy money resourcing teams of analysts who study transaction alerts and conduct Know Your Customer checks. Up to 50% of their time, they just collate data instead of focusing on the decision-making process. Virtual workforce can help banks to decrease the load on analysts and process a large volume of requests much quicker.
- Automated online and offline notifications. Communication is key to transparent relationships between financial institutions and consumers. It’s also critical to meet the requirements of financial regulations and stay compliant. CRMs and marketing automation tools, including Inkit’s direct mail automation, enable financial services to fully automate generation and delivery of notices.
By automating these processes, you can increase operational efficiency and enhance customer experiences. As if it wasn’t enough, automation also reduces expenses. According to estimates, by 2030, artificial intelligence (AI) will cut operating costs by 22%.
Yet before implementing specific payment, billing, or invoice automation practices, make sure to develop a solid strategy. Consider different approaches and tools to prioritize the stages of automation and do everything step by step. We recommend starting with automated communications as one of the most effective ways to boost your financial services.
