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CICI Bank, in 2016, announced the
deployment of ‘Software Robotics’
in over 200 business processes across
various functions of the bank. The
bank was one of the first in the
country and among few, globally, to
deploy ‘Software Robotics’ that
emulates human actions to automate
and perform repetitive, high volume
and time consuming business tasks
cutting across multiple applications.
The software robots at ICICI Bank are
configured to capture and interpret
information from systems, recognise
patterns and run business processes
across multiple applications to
execute activities including data entry
and validation, automated formatting,
multi-format message creation, text
mining, workflow acceleration,
reconciliations and currency exchange
rate processing among others.
RPA Journey at ICICI Bank
After three years, the bank is
running 1350 business processes on
RPA, which is currently being used in
customer on-boarding, transaction
processing, post transaction
servicing, reconciliation, loan
processing, where it involves moving
data between systems. “RPA is used
in a big way at ICICI Bank. In the area
of operations, the bank, on a daily
basis does 6.5mn transactions.
Mammoth organisations having a
baggage of legacy systems, have high
use cases for RPA. The reason being,
legacy setups are not tuned to work
with API in many cases and thus RPA
can be leveraged; they don’t have
good data upload functionalities and
even if it’s doable, conducting
validations is an issue,” says
Anubhuti Sanghai, Head – Operations
and Customer Service, ICICI Bank.
The actual building of the RPA tool
began with the inhouse team working
on it since 2012. The official
announcement was made in 2016.
‘Corporate limits setup’ was the first
process, that RPA was enabled for.
The sanction for the corporate limit for
fund and non fund based products is
complex. Once the sanction is
received, the disbursement is done.
Subsequently, the data is stored in the
core banking solution (CBS).
Hitherto, post the sanction, the
processes were manual i.e the data
was posted manually in the CBS after
doing the necessary validations. With
an investment of just two subject
matter experts, a robot was built in a
week to automate the process.
Currently, close to 1350 business
processes are running on RPA. In
technology operations, there are
thousands of processes that are RPA
enabled. It involves, data being
transferred from and to unconnected IT
systems. In 2016, ICICI Bank
announced automating over 200
processes. “However, they continued to
be RPA enabled until they were fully
dissolved into an automated system.
So, the 200 processes were reduced to,
for example 100 processes. They have
now gone upto 1350. The function of the
number of processes being run through
RPA is dependant on the amount of
digitisation of the overall systems in the
bank, for example, the case of corporatelimits mentioned earlier, is now being
API enabled. The sanctions system is
now connected with the CBS via an API
and thus no longer is there a need for it
to be run through RPA,” says Balaji VV,
Head – Business Technology Group,
ICICI Bank.
The more deep rooted an
organisation moves towards
digitisation, the more nuanced, the
need for RPA. Currently the systems
are partially digital and partially
physical requiring the information
take off and hand off. This is where the
need of an RPA arises. However, the
more business processes are
digitised, removing the physical
systems, it will take away the need for
RPA kind of systems. “ICICI Bank is
moving towards a service based
architecture, which is primarily API
based. Wherever API comes in, there
is no need for RPA,” says Balaji.Major RPA use cases
◗ Bank reconciliation: Faults in bank20 I COMPUTER RESELLER NEWSI JULY, 2019I crn.in
Cover Story
BBAALLAAJJII VV VV
HEAD – BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY GROUP, ICICI BANK