ABANCA, a Spanish retail bank, delivers personalized service to millions of customers, including tailored financial products and offerings. ABANCA has invested significantly in digital banking services that provide customers with a seamless online and mobile banking experience. Their digital transformation initiative aims to redefine operational efficiency and customer experience in the banking sector. To do this, they’ve focused on continuous innovation and utilized technologies like intelligent automation (IA) from SS&C Blue Prism, generative AI and natural language processing (NLP). Their outstanding efforts have been recognized with an SS&C Blue Prism Customer Excellence Award for Innovation Brilliance.

Challenge: Increase Operational Efficiency

When a customer needs to establish a mortgage or a loan or engages with the bank on another complex service, they must provide supporting documentation. Customers most often send this information to the bank via email with PDF attachments. The data in the PDFs is often unstructured, meaning an employee has to review each document, extract key information, classify the documentation and pass it to the relevant department. Sifting through pages of legal documentation was time-consuming and led to delays in processing customer requests.

Solution: Utilize IA, NLP and Generative AI to Rapidly Respond to Requests

ABANCA took an innovative approach to handling customer requests using a combination of IA and generative AI (GPT-4). SS&C Blue Prism digital workers now manage hundreds of thousands of incoming emails and perform initial tasks like document validation, data extraction and assigning tasks to human agents based on the request’s complexity. ABANCA’s NLP model works seamlessly with the digital workers to classify the documentation sent by the customer. GPT-4 then steps in to extract the data and perform validations against internal and external databases to confirm information like income tax returns, payroll and other financial data. Once validated, the digital worker deposits the data into an intuitive user interface using Google Sheet’s API for review by a human agent. This new process has drastically reduced the time agents spend on manual tasks, increased customer service response times and achieved substantial cost efficiencies.

In the last eight years, ABANCA has automated more than 1,000 tasks, which have improved both operational efficiency and employee productivity and delivered benefits to every department across the business. Digital workers have delivered a stunning 1.2 million hours — that’s 600 Spanish work years — back to the business. Freeing employees from manual tasks has unlocked new revenue streams because they can focus on tasks that add significant value, like cross-selling and personalized customer service. This task reallocation has led to increased job satisfaction and fewer operational errors. Customers benefit from faster and more transparent processes and a more satisfying user experience. Additionally, 150 of ABANCA’s employees have been upskilled and trained to create their own automations and manage digital workers that automate tasks in their departments. The improved efficiency and cost savings achieved by automation allows ABANCA to offer more competitive and accessible products and contributes to their innovative and customer-centric reputation.