Forbes article about the transition from UiPath to Python RPA. Read the translation of the article in Forbes Kazakhstan in English
How a large bank in Kazakhstan uses Python RPA and AI for intelligent automation
How a large bank in Kazakhstan uses Python RPA and AI for intelligent automation
Otbasy Bank is a long-time client of Python RPA. We invite you to read the translation of the article for the Kazakh IT media.
Otbasy Bank is the fourth largest bank in Kazakhstan by its assets. One of the first in the country, in 2020, the Otbasy Bank introduced the RPA platform. Nowadays robotization insists in every department, and the team is ready to tell you how tasks are divided between real and digital employees.
Banks are traditionally the first to investigate new technologies — it is important to be one step ahead of competitors. This is what happened to RPA. As soon as the technology appeared on the market of Kazakhstan, the IT department of Otbasy Bank began to choose a vendor. After comparing the platforms in terms of functionality and the price, Kazakh developer Python RPA – met all the requests.
RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a technology for automating the work that people do using the computers. Software robots do all the tasks quickly and with no mistakes instead of humans, saving hours and money. Formation of reports, data verification, information retrieval, data digitization — any routine tasks can be automated by using RPA.
With RPA you can quickly and cheaply optimize a large number of business tasks compared to other methods. And in some cases, for example, when working with governmental portals where automation is not possible, RPA is the only way to eliminate manual labor and speed up work.
Rauan Musabekov, director of the Information Technology Department of Otbasy Bank, said that they began to investigate the technology carefully: “We started robotics from the IT block. For example, we have robots for blocking and creating accounts, a robot for updating passwords, and monitoring the health of systems. Then they started offering other departments to robotize their routine. At first, our colleagues were skeptical and unenthusiastic to our suggestion. We had to work hard and prove that we offer a great tool. The result is that four years later, more than 40 processes have been robotized in the bank: in HR, IT, finance department, mortgage lending department and other departments. People have started to trust robots, and we receive requests for robotics every month.”
The first digital employees of the Bank and Python RPA were made together, and scaled the robotization regular programmers of the bank already independently, after completing the individual course. To develop the robots, it is required only Python knowledge and a free platform course. The company has a simple and convenient tool for quick disposal of employees from manual work.
Typical tasks without manual labor
The routine of bank employees is to check documents. During the implementation of a large-scale state housing program, the bank was faced with a huge number of documents that had to be processed manually. Each took three minutes, there were not enough resources, and robots came to the rescue: “The process was performed manually at first, but we quickly assembled the robot in Python. To recognize scans, we chose the Tesseract OCR solution and connected the robot directly to the Orchestrator – our team has strong skills in Python, and there are a lot of such specialists on the labor market now,” said Ergerey Mazhit, head of the department for the development of Otbasy Bank automation system.
The robot processed 2,000 documents per day. To complete such a volume of work in the same period of time, 13 real employees are needed. A large amount of work was carried out in the background without the involvement of additional specialists.
Another important process for the bank is the opening and closing of the operating day in ABS (automated banking system). To finish this task, an operational robot was developed, it is responsible for these procedures. And after the close of the day, at 2:00 a.m., the robot starts collecting information from ABS on all transactions for the balance sheet. By 7 am the document is ready – without manual labor, no mistakes, just in time.
Data protection is a priority for banks. Upon expiration of the employment contract, employees must immediately lose access to internal systems. The process of blocking and issuing accounts was also entrusted to the robot: it sees orders for admission, dismissal to the ABS, then creates or blocks accounts in applications such as, SED, ABS, Active Directory, BPM and others according to the matrix of roles and accesses. Blocking and creating accounts using RPA has closed information security issues. This is 5-10 times cheaper than the introduction of special access management software (Identity and Access Management). The Help Desk employees do not participate in this process, the robot creates and revokes user accesses in the systems itself.
Use Python-bots where it is impossible to automate
With the help of RPA, an important task is solved — working with government portals. Integration is impossible there, so the only option without robots is human manual work.
The Department for Dealing with Problem Loans interacts every day with the website of the State Revenue Committee to monitor bankrupt individuals. Every day you need to log in, download a report, verify information, and update the internal list. There is no direct integration, so the task is solved by using RPA: a software robot logs into the system instead of a human and downloads the report. Then he compares the data with the bank’s internal list. The robot sends data about new banknotes to the manager. The daily process, which used to take a lot of time for a real employee, is performed by a software robot in the background and without errors.
Ergerey Mazhit told about the principles of the integration of robots:
“We have formed criteria for selecting processes for robotization. We make robots to reduce human errors, improve the manageability of processes and to free up man-hours. We are not reducing staff, but redistributing the workload, and employees have free time for other, more complex tasks.”
There is also no direct integration with the Electronic Labor Exchange. Otbasy Bank’s IT team has developed a human resources robot. He registers and terminates employment contracts, records transfers and dismissals. The robot monitors HR orders in the system and then registers events on the state portal.
Scaling and Hyperautomation
Otbasy Bank dynamically develops products and faces a large number of difficult tasks. For this reason, the speed of development and implementation of solutions is a priority.
«We use low-code products for business process management (BPM), robots (RPA), Python, API tools and much more. If we see that somewhere it is better to make the API integration and we have the resources to solve this problem, then we are on the way to integration. It happens that first we do robots as a temporary solution, and then as we release resources we integrate» – shared Yegerei Mazit.
The basic business processes of the bank are covered by robotization. Right now, there’s a massive project in development using OCR to identify poorly read documents. Finding robotic processes and implementing RPA became basic tasks. Software robots do their job, and many employees may not even understand what process is done by a person and what by a robot.
«The bank has big plans for robotization ahead – we can safely say that the RPA technology has shown its effectiveness. It is also nice to work using the national RPA-platform Python RPA, which is not inferior to global foreign platforms» – summarizes Rauan Musabekov, Director of Information Technology Department of Otbasy Bank.
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