UOB's new robot employees Amy and Eve making quick work of data entry tasks

Singapore

UNITED Overseas Bank (UOB) has welcomed its first "virtual employees" that will take over tasks that the bank's human employees have found repetitive and time-consuming, cutting data processing time by more than half.

UOB on Wednesday unveiled Amy and Eve, two robots that have been assigned to teams supporting its wholesale banking and retail businesses.

The Business Times understands that these are not physical robots, but programmes using Robotics Process Automation software that execute "the more mundane data entry tasks".

A UOB spokeswoman said: "The speed and accuracy at which robots such as Amy and Eve can process such transactions enables us to respond faster to our customers in the long run. The introduction of robots into our workforce also enables us to improve our process through tech while maintaining a human touch."

Amy and Eve started work at UOB three weeks ago, and have since reduced data processing times by more than half, allowing human employees to focus on more stimulating and challenging job roles, said UOB.

Amy is attached to the Trade Finance Operations function, and helps to process requests for Letters of Credit by the bank's corporate customers. She extracts a wide range of data and then enters it into the Finance of International Trade Automated System for approval by a human colleague.

UOB said: "What used to take up to 240 seconds, 12 screens and multiple cross-checking for accuracy takes Amy only 40 seconds to complete."

Meanwhile, Eve's strength is in mathematics, with which she will review credit card applications as part of the Unsecured Loan Processing function. Her day-to-day activities involve combing through the information on customers' Central Provident Fund statements to compute their annual income. The information is provided to her human colleagues who will then finalise the application.

UOB said: "Eve has the ability to handle up to 1,800 applications per day and does it 3.5 times faster than others previously assigned this repetitive task."

Lim Ann Liat, managing director and head of markets and enterprise technology under UOB's group technology and operations unit, said that Amy and Eve represent "the dawn of a new virtual workforce in UOB".

UOB added that it plans to take onboard more robots in the coming months to manage other processes relating to card operations, cash management, and trade and remittance.

BT has learnt that OCBC Bank added two robots to its workforce in October. One is attached to the bank's Consumer Secured Lending (CSL) team, and the other to the finance team. Both do not have names.

The one at the CSL team assists with housing loan repricing by processing more than 100 repricing applications a day, and has enabled a 97 per cent cut in processing time.

The other robot at the finance team assists with sales performance reporting, a task that was previously handled by a bank employee. OCBC said that while its staff used to spend 120 minutes preparing a report, the robot has been able to do so in just 12 minutes.