Coast Capital Savings Robotic Process Automation...Coast Capital Savings Robotic Process Automation...

Coast Capital SavingsRobotic Process AutomationFebruary 2019

Coast Capital Savings | Robotic Process Automation

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The Financial Services marketplace is increasingly turning to Digitization and Automation capabilities to reduce cost-to-serve while improving efficiency, placing further pressure on organizations to modernize their operating environments with the adoption of new technologies.

Coast Capital Savings is rapidly earning a reputation as a leading Financial Institution through innovation. Who recognize that in order to move ahead of the pack, it is not enough to focus on rudimentary digitization – firms must use technologies in ways that force a re-think on how they fundamentally do business.

As Coast Capital begin their transition to become a federal financial services player, it has become clear that maintaining their brand around neighbourly customer service and financial well-being would require a creative approach. Furthermore an expected doubling of members and transactions would require a shift in where talent is focused – from back office tasks to where they do their best work – serving and advocating for customers. With the support of Deloitte’s experienced team, Coast Capital has made huge strides in their automation journey becoming one of the first Canadian credit unions to successfully implement Robotic Process Automation (RPA), generating significant benefits for the organization through better service, cost containment and reduced error rate.


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ForewordHighlighting the impact and potential of RPA in financial services

Steve CryerPartner, National Lead on R&[email protected]

Rajeev ShankarVP of the Enterprise Project Management [email protected]


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Who we are

Coast Capital Savings Federal Credit Union is a member-owned financial co-operative headquartered in Surrey, British Columbia, with the largest membership in Canada at 535,000 members, around 1600 employees and 17.1 billion in assets. They are currently expanding nationally across Canada.

What is RPARobotic Process Automation, or RPA, is a software solution that interacts with programs on a computer in the same way a person does, with one major difference: it can click, type, open programs and calculate more efficiently, with an automation rate of >75%, and with an up to 100% reduction in processing errors. This allows RPA to replace mundane and repetitive tasks once performed by workers, freeing up valuable time and allowing staff to concentrate on more dynamic activities that require critical thinking.

The ‘bots’ can be employed as a virtual workforce, set to work on back-office and behind-the-scenes processes (24/7 x 365) – a powerful tool in supporting more multifaceted human operations, especially in forward-facing tasks, such as dealing with customers. Unlike other solutions and costly system integrations, bots can be implemented through the cloud -- deployed over the internet -- without the need for top-tier technical knowledge and can be managed easily and efficiently.

Coast Capital’s Robotics and Automation journey

Cloud deliveryCloud technology enables companies to leverage virtual machines over the internet, which allows them to rapidly scale their simulated workforce with ease

ImpactEmployees Freed from monotonous obligations, are now able to focus on problem solving and value-add tasks.

Customers Receive a higher quality experience, where staff spend more time working on their behalf, instead of on routine and time-consuming data entry and paperwork.

After being given licence to expand nation-wide, we recognized that our customer base would grow; the initial estimates pointed to a doubling in approximately 18 months. In order to support our staff with an influx of members, we began to explore the use of RPA. We recognized early on that RPA would not only allow us to better capitalize on our growth, but would focus our internal efforts on standardization in order to digitize operations. It also reaffirms our vision to be pioneers in the space of Digitization and Automation where we continue to seek innovative ways to reduce cost-to-serve and improve efficiency in the financial marketplace.

We contracted Deloitte’s expertise to prove the value of RPA through two Proof-of-Concepts (POC). Deloitte completed these POCs while detailing key lessons to prepare us to rapidly scale this capability across our operations. The benefits we expected from RPA were:

• Increased operational efficiency Automation of rules-based repetitive tasks can reduce processing times by 40-80%. This large reduction is achieved not only through the fact that bots can do the work faster, but also by setting more than one bot to a task at a time. With RPA, efficiency is put on an exponential scale: each new bot halves the time to complete each job. This can lead to an increase in the available working hours for employees, which can be better utilized by the organization.

• Improved customer experience In order to deliver the same level of service to twice as many customers , we needed to develop new capabilities. By using RPA to reduce repetitive workloads for employees, our staff can be both more productive and more responsive to customers. This will create increased customer retention through enhanced service, and in a cost-effective way.

What were the key drivers that influenced you to begin your Robotics and Automation journey?

Why DeloitteDeloitte are experts in Robotics and Cognitive Automation (R&CA). They have:

• Over 900 trained practitioners

• Delivered R&CA across domains including HR, IT and Finance

• Established delivery centers worldwide

• Over 50 R&CA implementations: more than 800 automations using over 1000 bots

RPA: A stepping stone to automation technologies We see RPA as a stepping stone for us, opening up other avenues to automation. While RPA may be a new solution to many businesses, it is a mature technology, that has proven time and again that it can deliver on its promises. We are now looking to use the framework we utilized to roll out RPA to test out future technologies that could provide additional benefits, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML).


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RPA capabilities evolve along a spectrum: what a company is ready for and when, is dependant upon the organization. With consultation from Deloitte, we implemented a one-year program evolving from a Proof-of-Concept towards a Factory Model, defined as the Robotic Delivery Lifecycle (RDLC).

We first demonstrated RPA’s value using two ‘test automations’. With the success of these tests, we rolled out RPA as a robotic workforce and moved operations to the cloud. Two pivotal decisions that we made throughout this process were:

• Initial focus on Payment Operations Instead of trying to implement the RPA process extensively across our organization, we needed a discrete opportunity to prove RPA’s value. Payment Operations regularly occupied a team of up to six people doing identical tasks and was a sound candidate for an RPA solution. It also enabled us to avoid the risks associated with automating our services and release back-office workers to front face with our customers.

• Development of AWS stack to deliver future scalability We are proud to be leading the way, becoming one of the first financial institutions in Canada to deploy RPA through the cloud. By utilizing cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), we were able to simply and cost-effectively scale the number of bots that

were needed depending on the work load. There is no longer a need to buy or upgrade on-premise software, or spend needless time manually installing hardware.

By leveraging bots to work through the cloud on back-office operations, we were able to realize two significant benefits:

• Staff enablement: 20.5 hours of work saved on an average day; the equivalent of almost three full-time employees were able to better the business in other ways.

• Cost avoidance: We saved ~$1M by leveraging RPA to perform the functionality expected from a software upgrade that would have been expensive and made obsolete within 18 months. Instead, efficiencies were realized through RPA Automations.

What steps did you undertake to implement RPA and what have been the benefits?

Robotic Delivery Lifecycle (RDLC)The Robotic Delivery Life Cycle, or RDLC, is a five-step process that starts with identifying opportunities for RPA, assessing whether or not there’s a benefit to deploying RPA for each opportunity discovered, developing the needed capabilities and then implementing them. Lastly, on-going maintenance of the RPA processes.

Benefits by the numbers

Part-time bots

28

Full-time bot

1 6-14 weeks typical implentation time

Processesautomated 8

Reduction in errorsup to 100%Reduction inprocessing time

40-80%

In order to realize the breadth of the benefits mentioned above, we had to expand upon our abilities as a company and did so by leveraging the following:

• Clear vision and strategy for scale and growth Our vision is to utilize RPA as a core competency of our business. By doing so, RPA will not only work for current back-office operations, but for other processes as opportunities arise. Creating an internal RPA team is integral to this goal, as they will become a go-to resource for achieving ambitious outcomes and deploying RPA to support the organization during its national expansion and beyond.

• Coast’s Centre of Excellence (CoE) employed the Robotic Delivery Lifecycle (RDLC) Instead of individual experts in distinct business areas within our organization attempting to utilize RPA, an internal team, the Centre of Excellence, was tasked with seeking opportunities organization-wide. This provided the benefits of having one place to go to with questions, and a dedicated team pushing the advantages of RPA and using the RDLC to deploy bots in a structured and timely manner.

• Utilization of Deloitte resources until internal capability was developed While proving the concept of RPA with our ‘test automations’, we relied on the external Deloitte team for their technical expertise with an eye towards transitioning these automations to production. Ten months in, we acquired an RPA Process and Automation Specialist, beginning a hybrid period of internal and external resources. Our next steps are to expand our internal team with an RPA Controller and Developer in

early 2019.

How did you build your internal capabilities?


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How did you overcome and learn from the key challenges you faced?

Along the road to making RPA a useful and efficient technology in our operations, there were several challenges we had to overcome – by facing these obstacles head-on, we were able to take advantage of these learning opportunities to grow and strengthen as a company.

Data security and business confidence: “need for business buy-in”

Internally, we encountered reservations about deploying RPA through the cloud. In order to achieve business-wide buy-in, we had to address concerns about security, such as where customer data was stored. The internal team was tasked with educating various sections of our business as to what access RPA had (the same access as employees) and where it stores information (logs on site).

Challenges with cloud infrastructure setup

Our Centre of Excellence contracted Amazon Web Services to deliver their cloud technology, as we had success with AWS in the past. This technology is relatively new to banking automations, so we took the opportunity to grow our team’s capabilities on the platform, along with ensuring client information was safe — security is our top priority.

Paper and manual processes

RPA has its limits: it is only a software program, so it cannot automate manual processes -- it can only work with standard input data that has been digitized. As a result, for example, difficult-to-read documents need to be manually entered instead of simply being scanned. As our internal processes become increasingly digitized and optical-character recognition (OCR) improves, allowing computers to read scanned documents more reliably, we expect that a wider array of opportunities will become available.

Finding skilled practitioners in the marketplace

To make the most of the RPA technology, we knew we needed a good team behind it. This resulted in a longer waiting time to expand the team. Finding developers that already have RPA expertise is difficult, fortunately, RPA is relatively easy to learn. Knowing this, we looked for highly skilled programmers who could then learn RPA configuration and automation redesign.

Our goals are to make significant use of the RPA technology by doing the following:

• Continuing to implement RPA Factory Model with a specific focus on large and intensive processes

• Expanding on and building out our internal RPA capabilities

• Focusing on achieving a wider organizational effort on paper reduction with an eye towards digitization

• Exploring and piloting more robust and less-tested AI initiatives, such as chat bots, as a part of our vision of becoming a global leader in these cutting-edge technologies

ConclusionAs part of our national expansion, we turned to RPA to support the estimated doubling of our membership. By pursuing RPA from a Proof-of-Concept through to a Factory Model of analysing, testing, and deploying, we have freed up valuable staff from repetitive tasks and re-deployed to front-face with customers -- ensuring a high-level of customer satisfaction. We have saved ~$1M million by leveraging the uniquely human-like interfacing of RPA, and have automated eight processes with great success. Coast Capital is leading the race for Digitization and Automation in the financial marketplace by reducing cost-to-serve and improving efficiency, what’s more, it’s given our employees increasingly rewarding work, and our customers a superior experience.

What are your plans for your Robotics program moving forward?

The Automation SpectrumRobotics Process Automation Mass automations of simple tasks

Natural Language Processing Bots analyzing and generating data

Chat Bots and Virtual AssistantsAugmentation and support human operators

Virtual AgentWorks seamlessly with customers; no need for human intervention


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DeloitteSteve CryerPartner, National Lead on R&[email protected]

Mike RosenbloodSenior Manager, BC Lead on R&[email protected]

Cameron McGimpseySenior Manager, Engagement [email protected]

Amita Gill Banking and Robotics SME1-604-787-8757 [email protected]

Coast CapitalRajeev ShankarVP of the Enterprise Project Management [email protected]

Tomas Mojica Director, Enterprise Project Management [email protected]

Key contacts

To learn more...


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Deloitte provides audit & assurance, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory, tax and related services to public and private clients spanning multiple industries. Deloitte serves four out of five Fortune Global 500® companies through a globally connected network of member firms in more than 150 countries and territories bringing world-class capabilities, insights and service to address clients' most complex business challenges. To learn more about how Deloitte's approximately 264,000 professionals—9,400 of whom are based in Canada—make an impact that matters, please connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.

Deloitte LLP, an Ontario limited liability partnership, is the Canadian member firm of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited. Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee, and its network of member firms, each of which is a legally separate and independent entity. Please see www.deloitte.com/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and its member firms. © Deloitte LLP and affiliated entities.

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