Robotics enables DBS to free up 25,000 man hours of menial work

Singapore

ROBOTICS is helping to cut through the menial work involved in fighting financial crime at DBS Bank, which has collaborated with IBM in robotic process automation (RPA).

Since IBM helped DBS to set up a Centre of Excellence in RPA in June, the bank has applied RPA to 50 complex business processes across its operations, freeing up 25,000 man hours. Now the RPA programme will be progressively implemented in other markets, including Hong Kong, China, India, Indonesia and Taiwan.

One area in which DBS has applied RPA is that of combating financial crimes such as money laundering, fraud and tax evasion.

A DBS spokesman said this is one of the biggest regulatory challenges a bank deals with on a daily basis. This involves work such as identifying customers, tracking customers' sources of wealth and conducting surveillance on transactions, whether from a corporate, consumer or private banking account, or even a cash deposit in an ATM machine.

Any transaction that could be deemed suspicious has to be flagged. Has a customer made a large transaction that he has never made before? Did he transfer a large sum of money to someone else's account, only to have another large sum returned to his account in a short span of time?

Then comes the work of investigating these potentially suspicious activities, which is a laborious process, said the spokesman.

This involves checking, among other things, the customer's account history - sometimes going back years - related party accounts and the source and destination of their funds.

All this information comes from different databases that previously had to be manually trawled through.

Robotics has changed all that.

The spokesman said: "We are trying to make our employees' lives better by looking at all those underlying systems that are used, and using the robots to stitch these things together to construct a picture which our employees need to see.

"So we work hard to remove the mechanical aspect of the job. What we haven't done is remove the analytical aspect of the job - a human still has to make a judgement call as to whether, given all this information, that transaction is suspicious or not."

The spokesman said using RPA reflects the bank's pervasive culture of innovation.

"DBS believes that it's not just customer-facing channels that should be innovated. It's a whole-of-bank initiative - even our lawyers and compliance officers, our finance department, our auditors, all are on board."

Across the bank, software robots are transforming mundane activities using a style of automation where a software programme can help to manage and execute a wide range of repetitive, rules-based tasks that require handling high volumes of structured data.

Soh Siew Choo, DBS' managing director of technology and operations, said: "Cognitive and robotics process automation is an important capability that will help with the necessary speed and agility to meet the rapidly changing demands of customers and the evolving financial-services marketplace."

Chandra Somani, IBM lead consulting partner, added: "IBM has been helping DBS with not only the RPA programmme, but also with incorporating embedded analytics, machine learning and a whole ecosystem of capabilities such as Optical Character Recognition technologies to simplify, streamline and automate end-to-end business and operational processes."