Employing Cognitive Automation to Improve Financial Reports

The tasks of financial sector managers are changing each day. This has brought about the adoption of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The ability to automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks buys time for workers to concentrate on more creative initiatives. RPA robots can easily tackle human labor, allowing organizations to shift resources to activities of a higher value. RPA reduces human error immensely as well as improves the overall operational performance. The past economic crisis led to an improvement in protecting investors' capital and monitoring risks. For banks to operate effectively, they must comply with regulations across different geographical locations. Regulations such as MiFID and FINREP, which regulatory agencies like FCA and FINRA set, expect all organizations offering financial services to present reports in formats like FTP or XML. This has led to difficulty in complying with the regulations because of the tedious work involved. However, dire consequences are likely to be faced in case of non-compliance.

Manual reporting has reported cases of data inaccuracy, audit trail, inconsistency and operational risk. This has led to the adoption of digital technologies to ease the regulatory reporting process and change the way reporting is done.

Using Cognitive Automation to Improve Financial Reporting

A variety of organizations release static reports regularly. With cognitive automation, they can easily execute redundant tasks with valid outputs to ensure consistency. When dealing with custom regulatory reports, pre-programmed scenarios aid in generating reports with less human intervention. This enables business users to concentrate on the outcomes of the report. Important aspects that have to be put into consideration when future-proofing reporting activities that are moderated by machines include:

• The data available in the bank IT system should be accurate, complete and reliable
• Noting all reporting scenarios
• To algorithm should be capable of adapting to the evolving business realities

Cognitive Automation Examples

Retail Measurement

Among the biggest challenges in the retail industry is balancing data from various stores. Cognitive automation in financial reporting is aiding retailers in upgrading the data collection operation to create greater AI applications.

Accounting

The accounts team can computerize writing invoices by coding the software bot to receive invoice information from a pre-chosen source and feed it into the accounts system of a company. By handing over this repetitive task to a software bot, The accounts team can dedicate its time to analyzing payments done y vendors and identifying areas that need improvement in the company's cash flow.

Smart Processing of Documents

Using scanned documents that need manual processing, one after the other, is at an all-time high. Processes need to use optical character recognition to copy data from a PDF to the system to start further processing. With cognitive automation, technology such as OCR is used to enable the automation of the processor to supervise and decide in accordance with persistent data. OCR can handle unstructured data without error.

The following advantages are to be expected after the automation of financial reporting:

• Successful execution without external interruption
• Reduction in cost in hiring and training
• It eliminates difficulties associated with programming and scalability
• Savings on labor costs