How to get started with robotic process automation

Robotic process automation (RPA) is playing an increasingly important role in improving front- and back-office efficiencies, business scalability and customer service in all industries. For these reasons, PSCU began its RPA journey last year, furthering its commitment to help our Owner credit unions achieve a strategic, competitive advantage by delivering technology advancements.

PSCU partners with credit unions to help them meet evolving member demands, leveraging digital technology in providing various types of payment solutions and services. The increasing scope and scale of PSCU’s business activities drove the company to search for ways to further add efficiency without sacrificing quality or member experience.

One of the key tools we adopted for this purpose was RPA, which allows us to automate business-critical processes that are highly manual. One area that experienced challenges as a result of our growth, becoming more and more time consuming and costly, was the process for implementing federally-mandated index rate changes. Given the unpredictability and manual nature of the process, this made for an effective RPA pilot at PSCU.

Since we implemented our first RPA bot, we have supported three federal rate change events (including the latest one following COVID-19) that triggered hundreds of issuers to make APR changes to their portfolio(s). Historically, due to the volume and unpredictability of these requests, as well financial/regulatory implications of meeting service-level agreements (SLAs), we would need to pull in additional company resources to assist the configuration team. Through RPA, we have been able to automate many of the administrative tasks associated with these changes, enabling the configuration team to prioritize and manage the volume, work the exceptions and maintain quality.

 

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