Category: blog

Traditionally, workflow automation in financial services has been limited to two aspects. First, the front office is where automation is usually deployed – e.g., an automated chatbot to solve customer queries or marketing automation to increase customer engagement. Second, automations are implemented in silos to optimize individual tasks, without integrating into broader associated or contextually surrounding workflows. This leads to a host of missed opportunities, which you can address by reassessing underlying workflows and leveraging automation holistically.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Business processes change frequently, and your existing workflows and older approaches may be completely out of sync with today’s demands, causing missed opportunities.

• In addition to the front office, mid- and back-office processes like manual data entry could hugely benefit from automation. Particularly in the new normal, reduction of manual effort in such workflows makes a lot of sense.
• Digital transformation is an ongoing process and the upheavals of 2020 have significantly accelerated transformation initiatives. Pre-pandemic workflows, task-focused bots, etc. should be revisited and firms should look to leverage true end-to-end, integrated automation.
• Automation technologies are constantly evolving – for instance, intelligent automation uses AI/ML with rules-based automation in a hybrid model to be able to address the widest possible variety of scenarios. Existing systems and processes that got you where you are today may not be suited to unlocking these opportunities.

Meanwhile, the financial services industry has rapidly evolved to become digital-first, which further widens the gap between industry leaders and laggards. For instance, NVIDIA’s 2021 survey found that 1 in 3 firms plan to use AI to increase revenues by 20% or more. This calls for a well-articulated automation roadmap, starting with a reassessment of your current state.

Starting the Automation Roadmap: Considerations and Use Cases

Financial service firms starting out with mid and back-office automation must first ask themselves the following questions to understand the current state of workflows and what needs to change:

• How long ago were the workflows created and what problems were they intended to solve?
• Where are the gaps and roadblocks in the workflows that require manual intervention?
• What systems were used?
• Are the workflows adequately structured or well-defined?

It may be necessary to first transform the process and workflow map at your mid and back-office before you get started with automation. Ideally, workflows that are low in complexity and high in volumes are the best candidates for automation, which will be revealed through a careful assessment.

The top three use cases for workflow review, transformation, and automation in financial services include:

1. New account opening – Account opening activities involve structured and repeatable workflows that can be automated by integrating key enterprise systems.

2. Data migration/entry – Data migration between systems and data entry from unstructured documents to digital forms take up thousands of person-hours every year in a typical firm. Bots combined with AI technologies (OCR, ML) can perform these tasks automatically.

3. Anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud detection – AML workflows rely on a predetermined set of signals and data thresholds to detect risk and alert stakeholders. Through automation, you can improve detection accuracy and auto-alert stakeholders without delay.

New Priorities for a Reimagined World

Workflow automation is just another step in the holistic journey towards making financial services workflows more efficient and effective. And remember, this journey is never “done” or “over.” A new approach to automation is required that looks beyond siloed savings towards:

• Improved engagement and brand reputation by creating delightful experiences for customers and employees alike
• Holistic effort savings and hours freed up for value generation across the front, middle, and back-office
• Business resilience and scalability through a reduction in costs, risks, and technical debt

It all begins with recognizing that the workflows that got you here won’t get you there and identifying the precise strategic and technological levers needed to reach future growth milestones.

To learn more about how JIFFY.ai can help your financial services firm reimagine workflows to reduce costs while improving efficiency, contact us today at marketing@jiffy.ai.

We cannot emphasize enough the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) and automation (specifically Robotic Process Automation) has had, and will continue to have, on our industry. In fact, most advisors have grown so accustomed to their benefits, that they may not even realize the daily impact to their practices and clients. Consider your custodial platform and the way a client’s information seamlessly prepopulates in the system if he/she/they already has an account there. Or think about quarterly performance reporting; with the push a few buttons, you can generate reports for every single household in just a few minutes. AI and automation help reduce costs, increase accuracy in processes (like account opening) and ultimately create capacity for advisors, conceivably leading to increased revenue and profits.

There are challenges, however, that individual advisors face as it relates to embracing this new age of technology and fully automating their operations. First of all, some advisors are not yet reaping the full benefits; advisors within larger institutions are oftentimes limited to the systems and tools available at their home firm, many of which are siloed, fragmented, and outdated. 

Advisors who CAN build their own tech stack often struggle with “technology overload” and feel paralyzed by the many options and customizations.  In addition, training staff can be challenging. Even with access to the best operational tools, many advisory teams still use excel spreadsheets to manage and analyze data about their practices.  Finally, redeploying human capital towards revenue-generating activities is no easy feat. Work expands to fill the time we have to complete it, so ironically, just because capacity has been created, does not necessarily mean the time will be filled with productive work.

While digital transformation has recently become a key priority for the financial services sector, last year was a landmark period in this journey. Nearly half (49%) of firms have accelerated their initiatives, finds Deloitte, and the financial services sector has far outpaced other industries in their digital investments (arguably,  because our industry was so far behind others).

Over the years I’ve been part of several C-suite management teams and corporate boards for leading organizations at the intersection of financial services and tech. One first-hand observation I have made is that automation not only achieves short-term benefits like headcount of expense reduction, but it also creates a ripple effect that permeates across the entire company’s ecosystem. Strategic automation at the backend allows advisors to be more efficient in their work, and in turn, drives a far superior experience for the end customer. To achieve such holistic impacts, it is vital that we relook at our understanding of automation in financial services and the future roadmap.

Financial Services institutions have been primarily focused on building out an integrated infrastructure with interoperability between systems that enable a unified rendering of data for advisors. But this is only step one: It is when effective automation of front, mid, and back-office processes meets 360-degree business objectives, only then, advisors are free to build more capacity in their day and devote their time to more meaningful work, and eventually drive long-term business growth through lasting relationships with customers.

As a highly customer-oriented industry, banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) has always been a prime candidate for digital transformation. COVID-19 catalyzed the adoption of digital technologies in this otherwise conservative sector, says Deloitte in their 2021 banking and capital markets outlook. Moving away from in-person interactions created challenges, forward-thinking financial services firms viewed those challenges as opportunities to create better experiences through automation.

To fully realize the digital promise, BFSI firms can use a variety of levers to elevate process efficiency and customer engagement. These can include creating an optimal mix of digital and human interactions, using data intelligently to better shape experiences, and incorporating artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions to automate processes and free up capacity to focus on strategic activities.

Intelligent automation aided by AI and cognitive technologies can help to accelerate processing time and reduce the number of errors in complex processes end-to-end, removing the sector’s reliance on legacy methods like spreadsheets to get jobs done. This is a massive opportunity! According to McKinsey, AI could deliver up to $1 trillion in additional value for the banking sector.

Where to start using intelligent automation?

Even with all the digital transformation it underwent, the BFSI industry is poised to take further advantage of the technologies that can expand its field of vision and open even more opportunities, including intelligent automation.

Though the first wave of automation improved some financial service providers’ basic functions by employing robotic process automation (RPA) for repetitive tasks, there are many organizations that are still in need of far more sophisticated and intelligent applications of automation for their evolving business processes. Firms that are already scaling their intelligent automation efforts are leading with improved experiences across the value chain while reducing their operating expenses and driving better margins through significant process evolution.

These automations have proved to perform iterative tasks at scale. They ingest data from third-party sources, populate digital platforms, trigger notifications and initiate actions without human intervention, so the firms can virtually operate 24/7 without overburdening employees.

Forward-thinking firms continue to streamline their automation-readiness. These organizations are seeing the benefits of intelligent automation unlocked across multiple operating areas through use cases that have a significant, positive ROI. For instance, we recently helped automate redemption request processing for a US-based financial services leader, transferring metadata between the front-end and back-end systems, eliminating staff involvement altogether. Our customer continues to see recurring expense reduction, saving thousands of person-hours of resource expenditure with this engagement.

Based on our experience and expertise working in this industry, we have shortlisted a few similar business use cases where intelligent automation has been creating fast and incisive impact.

1. Letting customers open accounts remotely

AI is an integral component of intelligent automation and sets it apart from stand-alone, traditional RPA. Using AI, you can leverage technologies like Optical Character Reading (OCR) and cutting-edge facial recognition, blended with an integrated intelligent automation platform, to help fully automate and accelerate the account opening process. Customers need only to initiate a video call, and the facial recognition solution evaluates features to verify identity. Post the verification, the intelligent automation solution can then take over to extract the necessary details from remotely shared data to populate the fields in your enterprise resource planning (ERP) or core system.

2. Saving effort, costs, and time in data migration

Any digital transformation activity, where you are modernizing applications that have existed for decades, involves complex data migration. Lenders, credit assessment firms, insurance companies, and similar service providers rely on data as a key asset. Traditional migration of data would involve at least six stakeholders (a business user, a data custodian, a systems specialist, a database specialist, a product specialist, and an extract, transform, and load specialist). An intelligent automation solution that reads the legacy source, applies transformation/reformatting procedures, and loads the data into the new schema can significantly cut down the human effort, operational costs and turnaround time involved in this process.

3. Making credit risk assessment more accurate and scalable

The analytics technology needed to accurately screen prospective borrowers and assign risk scores already exists. However, human employees still need to go through this data, which can be cumbersome and prone to errors, especially when it comes to processing small-to-micro retail loans. An intelligent automation solution can connect with the analytics engine on one end, and the underwriting system on the other, to automatically process risk assessments and loan applications below a certain threshold.

4. Detecting fraud and setting up timely alerts

By mapping and continuously monitoring real-time transactions against data from ERP, business intelligence, and third-party providers, your anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud detection teams can detect suspicious behavior and signs of misappropriation. An intelligent automation solution can not only help them by keeping a constant watch for these tell-tale signals (purchase order mismatch, split transactions, payments made at unusual hours) but also alert the necessary parties in real time. Leveraging this, you can set up an automated workflow for low-value transactions, where suspicious behavior can be approved or blocked automatically.

5. Processing and validating applications while maintaining data integrity

Manual application validation processes – whether for banks, insurance, or asset management firms – are painfully error-prone and tedious. When done using spreadsheets (which is still a staple for the BFSI industry), there are the added risks of data inconsistency, inability to track lineage across multiple systems, and duplication. An intelligent automation solution, on the other hand, can extract and store data involved in all these processes, so it can be easily accessed, tracked, and used. Leveraging technologies such as OCR, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the solution, your business users can process complex applications from large commercial entities within no time, and customize the solution to suit emerging process changes as and when needed, without depending on the IT team.

But does that mean you have to disrupt your existing IT landscape to build an intelligent automation system afresh? The best part is, it can be integrated /added into / onto your IT infrastructure seamlessly adding more value to it, and enabling bidirectional data flow with ERP, content management systems, regulatory databases, and custodian data portals.

These five use cases are just the tip of the iceberg. The potential use cases for intelligent automation in financial services are vast, including business-critical processes such as KYC/Re-KYC, card activation, audit processes, customer engagement, and reconciliation in wealth management.

Discover more ways that intelligent automation can enable you to unlock these hidden opportunities in our eBook How Intelligent Automation is Propelling Banking & Financial Services: Top Ten Use Cases Reimagined. The eBook also explains how JIFFY.ai’s integrated platform-based approach can help realize exponential returns from your automation investment.

Download eBook

To learn more, visit https://jiffy.ai/solutions/banking-and-financial-services/

Connect with our intelligent automation experts and accelerate your automation journey.

With COVID-19 causing risks to human health and disruption to our way of life in general, especially the way we work, companies have been forced to pursue alternate ways of making progress. Many of them are striving to use intelligent automation and AI to innovate their way forward while working safely from home.

This shift does not mean that we do not value human work, or the role people play in the enterprise. Think about the agricultural revolution. In the 18th century, people transitioned from hard laboring stationary farming to original inventions that altered the farming process. The new patterns of crop rotation and livestock utilization paved the way for better crop yields and the ability to support more animals. It was an opportunity to produce more, not a judgment of the reduced value of human work.

These agricultural changes impacted societies as there was a decline in both the intensity of the work and the number of farming laborers needed. Nevertheless, the positive effects of this disruption gave life to new technologies and opportunities as people migrated to the city to work in industrial jobs. As humans, it’s in our nature to innovate and create new solutions that become paramount to organizations and the people that work within them. We believe that as intelligent automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning continue to evolve, we have an opportunity to harness this energy of innovation in a whole new way.

Our mission is to enable organizations to cross the human machine divide that has existed since the introduction of machines and enable them to co-exist seamlessly. We aim to reduce the friction between the two in a natural, human-friendly way. Eliminating the need for expensive translation mechanisms in the form of data entry, data synchronization and mundane activities allows organizations to become extremely efficient and resilient. Enabling innovation within the enterprise using natural language instructions, we bring out the innovator in the everyday business user. By letting the machines understand human language to achieve automation we drive speed in business transformation previously not possible. This is the core of our perspective on automation.

For too long, enterprises have placed contradictory expectations on their most talented thought leaders and employees. We have expected people to be innovative while also weighing them down with administrative tasks. Research shows “task switching” disrupts flow of thought and creativity. Ultimately, we launched JIFFY.ai to reduce this phenomenon and to allow creativity to flourish and innovation to be unleashed in its most uninterrupted form. Our relentless commitment is to see a change in how organizations redesign their work, supporting them through the power that automation and AI offers to maximize strength, resiliency and scale.

Historically, automation was seen as a point solution for mundane actions. You gave it a specific function or set of functions, and it performed. Now, technology allows us to elevate and redefine the process and achieve progress through automation. This change is necessary in the ever-evolving landscape in which we live.

Automation in the workplace has seen a sharp rise in the last two years. According to Gartner, global revenues from automation software will reach $1.89 billion in 2021, up by 19.5% since 2020, and this double-digit growth rate is expected to continue through 2024. This is due to several key benefits of automation such as error reduction, improved productivity, cost savings, and reduced risk. Yet, if implemented haphazardly, workplace automation could end in significant sunk costs and companies could struggle to scale beyond the first few pilots. Studies by McKinsey found that just 15% of companies were able to set up a comprehensive and scalable automation program in 2020.

In other words, despite the clear benefits of automation in the workplace, companies must look beyond the traditional siloed approach and adopt an integrated platform model to achieve their evolving growth needs. To understand this further, let us explore the meaning of process automation in more detail.

What is Process Automation?

Process automation can be defined as a collection of technologies that help to remove or reduce the manual efforts needed in front, middle, and back-office tasks to unlock efficiency gains.

The more sophisticated your process automation is, the more complex tasks it can optimize. For example, a highly advanced intelligent automation solution like JIFFY.ai can reduce thousands of person-hours spent on manually processing invoices, while learning and adapting to various invoice templates, rules, supplier types, and other exceptions. Typically, process automation uses cognitive technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and optical character recognition (OCR) to unlock outsized benefits.

Benefits of Automation in the Workplace

Workplace automation can help you:

• Drive accuracy – There are fewer chances of human bias, subjectivity, negligence, or fatigue impacting your process outcomes. 67% of companies felt this is a top benefit, as per IDC.
• Boost productivity – You can complete a higher volume of tasks per employee, as manual effort per task is reduced. 64% agreed on this benefit.
• Save costs – Reduced errors and more productivity mean that your expenditure per task will shrink. 60% of companies gained from this benefit.
• Reduce risk – As processes become more consistent and less error-prone, you can strengthen compliance and risk management. 54% experienced a reduction in operational risk due to workplace automation.
• Empower employees – As mundane and repetitive mid- and back-office tasks are automated, your employees can focus on customer experience, product innovation, business strategy, and achieve better work-life balance. This was a key benefit for 51% of companies.

Pros and Cons of Automation in the Workplace

Automation’s biggest advantage is that you can make tasks and processes significantly more efficient. This lets you utilize your human talent to scale faster and innovate better. However, there are a few challenges it brings along:

• It can take time to deploy – Writing complex automation scripts from scratch and maintaining them is extremely time and effort-intensive. A wiser approach is to invest in a low-code platform approach, like the JIFFY.ai AUTOMATE platform with its HyperApps that can be configured and run by business users.

• Traditional RPA is rigid – Robotic process automation (RPA) uses fixed business rules to automate workflows, which makes it difficult to adapt to complex or variable processes. You need a flexible platform that can learn using ML and loop in a human being when necessary.

• It can cause silos and fragmentation – If just one, standalone process is automated, there will be fragmentation in data flow and workflow across the enterprise. That’s why your automation platform needs to be integrated with business systems like ERPs and CRMs to reap the full benefits of digital transformation.

Companies including the Fortune and Global 500, and the Big4 consulting have worked with JIFFY.ai to address automation challenges and modernize their workplaces for the future. Email us at marketing@jiffy.ai to learn more.

How can you guide your organization through digital transformation when approximately 80% of business data still exists in unstructured forms such as emails, images, and PDFs?

Yes, you need a tool to quickly digitize all these documents with minimal manual effort. Intelligent document processing enables this and helps you automate document-related business processes at scale. Here’s how.

Intelligent document processing (IDP) is defined as a set of tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Optical Character Reading (OCR) and other technologies that can convert unstructured, semi-structured, and structured documents into machine-readable data, which is the foundation of business process automation.

Industries and enterprise functions that rely heavily on documents, such as banks, schools, healthcare institutions, HR and Finance & Accounting can save tremendous amounts of time, effort, and investment using IDP.

For instance, one of our clients, a leading automobile manufacturer, was able to achieve 85% straight through processing over a 12-week period across a volume of 150,000 invoices per month for 5,000 suppliers using our invoice processing HyperApp. The HyperApp that has built-in intelligent document processing capabilities helped their AP team to cut the time needed to process one invoice from 24 hours to just 3 minutes. The solution helped automate 90% of their invoice processing.

IDP can drive these outsized benefits due to its key advantages over traditional document processing automation solutions.

Intelligent Document Processing vs. Automated Document Processing

IDP improves upon pure ML-based document processing solutions in four ways.

What is Document Processing Software? IDP Software Explained, with an Example

An IDP software is an application that packages all the capabilities mentioned above (low-touch, GUI-based, AI-powered, and adaptive), into a single, business-user-friendly platform. For example, JIFFY.ai offers a hybrid IDP software that can handle heterogeneous documents and data formats using both ML and rules-based processing, along with sophisticated OCR. Using our intelligent document processing software, you can:

• Process a variety of documents, involving complex tables, tables with/without lines, multi-page documents, etc.
• Extract data from various ID card formats, receipts, driver’s licenses, and other similar documents
• Automatically extract and feed data to the destination applications, such as CRM, ERP, etc.
• Easily define and train new ML models for unfamiliar document formats
• Handle exceptions and automate document processing-related activities at scale, even when there are thousands of types of documents involved

The JIFFY.ai Approach to Document Processing: Efficient and Future-Ready

As companies continue to embrace and progress digital transformation rapidly, the efficiency gains offered by IDP will make it an enterprise staple and elevate employee experiences by eliminating tedious repetitive work.

JIFFY.ai adopts a hybrid approach to IDP so you can gain from AI’s predictive capabilities while learning from human inputs when exceptions arise. This places our document processing software ahead of most industry peers in terms of accuracy, scope, and user support. For example, JIFFY.ai extracts text inside complex tables with 15-20% more accuracy compared to competitors.

With true touchless processing and usage-based SaaS pricing (you pay only for the volume of documents processed), JIFFY.ai’s Intelligent Document Processing solution helps to defragment data extraction from myriad documents spread across the enterprise, and thus changes the paradigm of enterprise automation, thereby accelerating innovation.

Learn more about the IDP core that powers our Invoice Processing HyperApp.

As we wrap up the first half of 2021, several parts of the world are still reeling under the impact of the successive waves of the pandemic. Maintaining business continuity and building resilience for predictable growth is an imperative for businesses across the world.  With industries gearing up for bullish economic weather, business leaders are leaving no stone unturned to remove all process bottlenecks that could pose hurdles in their resurgence strategies. Your Accounts Payable team plays a central role here, maintaining transactional integrity, ensuring sustainable cash flow, and powering your core business, often with limited and restricted resources.

Process modernization and optimization are key priorities for Accounts Payable teams that have already embarked on this transformational journey. According to the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic survey by the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP), 65% of businesses will move from paper payments to electronic formats, while 38% will rewire their internal procedures. Digitization will pave the way for smarter, more efficient processes, where employees need to spend far fewer person-hours to complete routine tasks, thus unlocking savings as well as ushering in an overall culture shift.

If your Accounts Payable team is already on this superfast transformation highway, here are five key takeaways for you:

1. Consolidate the digital forays of the previous year

The first step towards building a futuristic invoice processing strategy should be consolidating the fragmented digital transformation initiatives undertaken last year. In 2020, businesses had to adopt remote-friendly processes and support Accounts Payable teams as they started to work from home almost overnight. In some cases, this added to process complexity as simple in-person tasks (e.g., paper-based approvals) were no longer possible. Supplier/vendor network management also went digital, which has its own risks in the long term. At this point, it is vital to consolidate any point solutions you might have in place, take stock of vendor sentiment and any user experience bottlenecks they might be facing, and evaluate the projected total cost of ownership of your Accounts Payable systems beyond the pandemic.

2. Optimize cash flow to prepare for unexpected challenges

The pandemic left very little room for error in cash flow management, and this trend will continue in the second half of 2021 as economies recover and businesses return to their growth trajectory. A report by the International Labor Organization found that cash flow was the #1 problem faced by 4500+ companies in 45 countries worldwide. Improving Accounts Payable efficiency and modernizing your invoice processing strategy could help optimize cash flow. For instance, recommendations generated by cognitive technologies could suggest changes in the order of supplier payments that would maximize your cash on hand. These technologies can assign risk scores to every vendor and make sure that you gain from early payment discounts.

3. Upskill your AP team to perform and innovate

The year 2020 marked a tectonic shift in how we work, and this will have a lasting impact on workplace culture, how employees approach routine tasks, and their aspirations for the future. In the absence of a physical office and the physical presence of a professional community, inefficiencies in business processes became starker. Your employees are now less likely to be satisfied with repetitive, high-volume tasks in this ‘work from home’ season. There are two major action points for businesses through the year 2021. Eliminate mundane, iterative and non-fulfilling work wherever possible (this has typically been a chronic challenge for the Accounts Payable team). Employees who are freed up can be up-skilled to focus on more innovative work, such as in decision-making, the use of advanced technology systems, and discretionary problem-solving: essentially, tasks that machines cannot perform.

4. Adopt agile workflows to gain from dynamic economic weather

Through the rest of this year, businesses can look forward to a largely optimistic economic forecast, albeit with occasional regional curveballs on the way. In the last couple of quarters, we saw the International Monetary Fund revise its predictions several times, underscoring the need to stay agile and adaptive. In this context, rigid Accounts Payable workflows and monolithic processes will make it difficult to keep pace with fluctuating conditions. Instead, businesses must establish processes that are easy to configure – onboarding new suppliers with minimal risk or delays to support renewed demand, reconciling invoice exceptions and corrections seamlessly, and scaling up without adding complex approval red tape.

5. Leverage intelligent invoice processing automation to scale sustainably as you grow

The best-case scenario to look forward to this year is a rapid return to the original growth trajectories, aided by a resurging economy in 2021-2022. Businesses cannot afford to let speed-breakers such as inefficient processes, errors arising from human fatigue, and the risk of non-compliance, slow down this journey. The Accounts Payable function as a whole — and invoice processing, specifically — is part of the core of any organization. As the throughput of your Accounts Payable team increases, its invoice processing capability must focus on increasing straight through processing capacity. That way, it can scale in tandem to make profitability truly sustainable and mitigate the impacts of any further unprecedented disruptions. Strengthening this function using cutting-edge technology, helping your AP team and the supplier network, and the business as a whole should be a key agenda item in your strategy.

Your top strategic priority for the emerging future should be to remove the bottlenecks in the invoice processing function, and intelligent automation can play a key role here. Here are a few points to ponder:

• An intelligent automation solution can centralize the steps taken to digitize invoice processing in specific business units, regions, and teams amid the rushed switch to remote operations.
• It can equip your AP function with customizable supplier portals, AI/ML insights, and suggestions for decision-making based on your business rules, thus optimizing cash flow.
• It can ingest invoicing data from EDI file formats, XML/JSON files, mailbox attachments, and scanned images, making life simpler for your AP team working remotely; automated data extraction, validation, and exception handling further reduces repetitive manual work and probable errors.
• An end-to-end intelligent automation platform makes touchless processing a reality by supporting highly configurable workflows, where you can specify thresholds for manual approval, fraud signals, vendor prioritization and more, depending on changing market conditions.
• Invoice processing costs can be optimized as your business operations scale (thanks to a scalable solution architecture and volume-friendly pricing model), making the investment in digitalizing your Accounts Payable function truly sustainable for the long term.

Learn how JIFFY.ai’s intelligent Invoice Processing HyperApp has been enabling customers from various industries to prioritize these five capabilities. In fact, these are a part of our central value proposition to future-proof the Accounts Payable function. Drop an email to marketing@jiffy.ai today.

Even with all your enterprise-level digital adoption, accounts payable can still be one of the most paper-intensive departments in your organization. The team’s primary function, invoice processing, costs the company resources due to time-consuming and repetitive tasks, slow processing cycles and human-introduced errors. The longer you ignore the cost of manually processing invoices, the deeper the dents it tends to cause in your organization’s bottom line. Learn how the benefits of accounts payable automation can reverse that trend.

The True Cost of Your Invoice Processing Flow

The U.S. Institute of Finance & Management (IOFM) suggests that the cost of processing a single invoice can be anywhere between $1 and $21. Putting this into perspective, think of a mid-sized company that has approximately 1,000 invoices to process per month. They would lose significant money through the gaps caused by process inefficiency. AP automation benefits can help to solve those inefficiencies and reduce your invoice processing costs.

What Makes Invoice Processing Expensive?

Wondering how best to calculate the expense of processing invoices in your organization? The simplest way is to equate it with the costs of associated human effort. Typically, a member of your accounts payable team would take at least 30 minutes to process a single invoice. Considering the average salary of an accounts payable clerk in the U.S. is $43,917 (approximately $21 per hour), processing one invoice could cost $10.50.  For the mid-sized company mentioned earlier, this would add up to more than $10,000 every month.

And that’s not all! At this point, we’ve only discussed the base costs involved. But there’s more to it, such as:

• Cost of fixing manual errors: Invoice processing is highly susceptible to errors due to daily variances, volume-based pressure or sometimes even sheer human fatigue. To fix such errors on a paper invoice, you might have to spend a significant $53.50 to create a new document, communicate with different stakeholders and redact payments already made.
• Lost opportunity costs, such as discounts: Most vendors offer discounts for early payments, which can be as much as 2% to 5%. Manual invoice processing can create delays, causing the payment to miss the discount window.
• Strained vendor relationships: The inefficiencies related to manual invoice processing, such as delayed payments, payment redactions and multiple requests for the same information, can seriously damage your brand’s reputation in today’s vendor and supplier landscape. More severe mistakes could even harm long-term relationships, adding to your overall invoice processing costs.
• Physical costs, like storage and paper: Manual invoice processing goes together with paper-based processes, involving costs for physical file storage, stationery, etc. Unstructured hybrid systems can be even more expensive as the accounts payable team might have to switch between digital and paper formats, spawning duplication.
• Cost of efforts diverted from core functions: Finally, complex approval processes coupled with frequent exceptions call for measures by personnel outside the invoice processing team. Business leaders might have to intervene in invoice processing, and their valuable person-hours (which would otherwise be spent on higher-value functions) must be factored in.

What is Invoice Workflow Automation & STP?

Invoice automation and the benefits of accounts payable automation go beyond barebones e-invoicing, which only recreates paper processes in a digital format and replicates its inefficiencies. The intelligent automation of invoice processing leverages technology in a meaningful way to remove the bottlenecks in your accounts payable workflow, bringing human intervention down to near-zero. This enables straight-through processing, or STP, where automated technology manages the end-to-end invoice lifecycle, and the average handling time by humans is dramatically reduced.

6 AP Automation Benefits That Achieve STP and Help Reduce Invoice Processing Costs

According to McKinsey, intelligent automation can streamline 93% of tasks in payment processing. The stages of accounts payable automation include:

1. Extract Invoice Data Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

AI/ML-based technology such as object recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) can extract data from scanned images, PDF snapshots, etc. and automatically populate the fields in your accounts payable system. Intelligent invoice extraction is compatible with country-specific EDI formats, XML/JSON files, scanned images and even mailbox attachments.

2. Set up A Custom Supplier Portal

The worst long-term issue caused by inefficient invoice processing is probably the erosion of trust in vendor relationships. The smart UX of an automated solution allows you to set up a digital portal where vendors and suppliers can choose their relevant forms, make data entries and enjoy seamless interactions with your invoice processing team.

3. Configure Workflows to Handle Exceptions

Among the many benefits of accounts payable automation, automated exception handling lets your accounts payable staff tackle complex invoice scenarios without claiming the time of multiple business stakeholders. For example, they can set up workflows to handle exceptions such as potential signs of fraud, invalid vendor data, invalid file formats and specific PO detail mismatches. Configurable rules like these for invoice validation reduce an agent’s time to manually process an invoice by 80%.

4. Integrate with Your ERP

An AP automation workflow can connect with your existing systems like SAP, Oracle, Pegasus, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Infor, Sage or homegrown applications to enable bi-directional data flow. Your ERP can act as the reference for validating extracted invoice data (which otherwise needs to be performed by an AP staff member) and document the workflow information.

5. Gain from Analytics and Data Insights

Over and above AP automation benefits like lower invoice processing costs, automation becomes a true value generator here. First, it uses validation rules to assign a risk assessment score to every invoice. It also prioritizes tasks automatically based on load, productivity or your unique segmentation rules. Next, it uncovers vital data from your invoice processes to highlight productivity trends, KPIs and improvement areas, creating real-time visibility into invoices pending approval.

6. Consider Hosting on the Cloud

Cloud-based workflow automation software significantly lowers your upfront costs and ongoing maintenance overhead, while reducing your overall TCO. On-premises partly managed hosting is also an option in areas where there are critical regulatory requirements.

Save More as You Grow. Make Accounts Payable a Profit Center.

While traditional invoice processing methods become more expensive with scale (as volume and costs are directly related), intelligent automation and STP allow you to reduce costs as you grow. As the solution architecture is inherently scalable, your automation partner can offer volume-based efficiencies — for example, incrementally reduced pricing for volume tiers above 5,000 invoices per month.

JIFFY.ai delivers invoice processing and accounts payable automation benefits for small businesses, large finance and accounting teams and every organization in between. We can help them achieve 80% STP and reduce the human efforts needed to process invoices from a new supplier to 0%. Sophisticated AI and ML-based workflows allow you to look beyond just replicating age-old manual processes in a digital wireframe. Leveraging our intelligent and scalable automation HyperApps, we are committed to helping future-oriented enterprises derive business value across critical functions like accounts payable.

Get the Benefits of Accounts Payable Automation with JIFFY.ai

If you want to iron out bottlenecks or inefficiencies in your business processes through sustainable, intelligent invoice processing automation, please email us at marketing@jiffy.ai. Our HyperApps experts will be happy to help you accelerate!

2020 was a landmark year for digital transformation. In the face of an unprecedented global crisis, technology emerged as the key enabler for resilience for all types of businesses —small teams or multinational enterprises, consumer-oriented or B2B vendors alike. Now, as we work through the road to recovery, many face the slightly uncomfortable question: How much of this change is scalable and operationally sustainable for the long term, including in terms of ROI?

The question becomes more pertinent as we look at these facts from McKinsey & Company’s recent report on the sheer pace of digital transformation last year:

• The digitalization of customer interactions accelerated by 3 years globally.
• Companies started to digitally reimagine their products/services 7 years ahead of schedule.
• Over 6 in 10 executives believe customer expectations have changed forever.

Yet, most companies are not positioned to sustain their digital transformation projects for the long haul. Only half of them believe that the rapid surge in adoption of technology for their operations will continue after the pandemic – which could potentially stall progress or set the other half back by several years and tens of thousands of dollars of hurried sunk costs. Of course, there is always this risk when the shift is due to a black-swan moment and not organic, evolutionary change.

Moving beyond the pandemic, organizations will have to take hard-won learnings about the need for flexibility and responsiveness of AI digital transformation initiatives and determine ways to build real and lasting resilience that can ensure growth and the capability to weather future storms. A prime example of this is the accelerating trend of using intelligent automation digital transformation roadmaps, and automating more complex end-to-end business processes in a scalable, more sustainable way.

How the Pandemic Revealed Crucial Gaps in Digital Transformation plans

Many businesses learned vital lessons through the last year — involving crucial gaps that otherwise would have gone unnoticed — when they tried to push the pedal to the metal on their digital transformation plans.

1. Technology sprawl: In a bid to speed up digital adoption, business units and individual users were ready to adopt their favorite applications and enablers ‘under the radar’.  This contributed to the ever-sprawling shadow IT landscape without organizational visibility, coordination or leverage. Only an integrated enterprise automation solution can put the power of technology enablement back in the hands of business users while keeping it within the realm of the organization’s overarching digital transformation framework and technology strategy.

2. Higher propensity for technical debt: If shadow IT was one side of the coin, the other was retro-fitted automation often requiring many code changes that aren’t always reconciled. In the pre-pandemic world, organizations were already struggling with technical debt as a multitude of non-integrated automation technologies were applied to legacy systems. In the emerging normal, they will look for ways to implement technology capabilities faster, without dramatic overhauls and inflexibility that results in technical debt. Adopting a HyperApps approach is a more viable way to achieve scalable, sustainable automation.

3. Culture woes: Cultural dissonance blocks digital transformation like no other variable. If business users, leaders, and decision makers aren’t on the same page, both strategically and in terms of execution, the dissonance will bring digital transformation to a standstill sooner than later. To prevent this, technology enablers must intersect larger strategic goals with short-term business outcomes and democratized use, and adopt platforms that enable this.

The first step to overcoming these challenges is to place sustainable automation at the core — of course, leaning into the best practical way of doing it — and to leverage the convergence of all its powerful capabilities.  These include AI, Machine Learning, cognitive capabilities, cloud computing, no-code/low-code application development, and end-to-end integration, combined with a human-in-the-loop approach, where enterprises can achieve maximum advantages.

Can Digital Transformation Happen Without Automation?

Automation in many forms, including robotic process automation (RPA), has quickly become one of the integral pillars for digital transformation. An RPA digital transformation brings about incremental improvements in process efficiency, and step-level improvements in enterprise capability when applied strategically. It builds resilience to crises, like a pandemic or economic slowdown, where labor shortage and market volatility would disrupt traditional production systems. Automation also makes room and provides for further innovation by freeing up budgets and resources and ensuring that digital transformation works in an ongoing, iterative cycle. Digital transformation without automation is like a car with a limited engine: it simply cannot go the distance with the power to transform and accelerate, and can consume more effort to maintain than the value it generates.

So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that 81% of IT organizations will automate more tasks to allow team members to focus on innovation over the next 12 months to 18 months, which according to Salesforce, will drive true digital transformation.

What should come as a surprise is that problems such as integration, script maintenance, control, compliance and scalability continue to plague traditional RPA deployments. This is a worrying fact, given that 84% of decision-makers plan to increase their investments in automation – without the assurance of sustained ROI or an uncomplicated implementation roadmap.

The HyperApps approach: Evolve beyond your existing RPA implementations

While traditional RPA relies on rule-based engines and technical configurations to automate workflows at the task level, HyperApps take a more democratized, business user-oriented approach for achieving end-to-end business process automation, and optimizing machine-human collaboration. They have a GUI platform where business users, data scientists, and IT professionals – stakeholders across the digital spectrum – can participate in setting up and operating meaningful business process automation.

This approach enables teams across the organization to implement, iterate, scale and grow, and addresses many of the challenges organizations currently face when preparing transformation projects for long-term sustainability. It also facilitates optimum teamwork and a culture of innovation.

• HyperApps can automate business processes across the board, shrinking the technology sprawl.
• The no-code interface empowers teams, reduces maintenance needs and technical debt.
• HyperApp components are reusable and scalable, which lowers total cost of ownership (TCO), and accelerates time to value and ROI.
• Compliance is baked-in, without requiring further investment.

Ultimately, automation will be central to long-term digital transformation as organizations look beyond short-term responses and adopt SaaS strategically to address new omnichannel opportunities. By opting for HyperApps, they can address the foundational challenges of their RPA investments and take enterprise automation to the next level.

Making Digital Transformation Scalable, Sustainable and Future-oriented

The pandemic brought about a rapid global paradigm shift, wherein businesses focused more than ever on delivering against digital-first customer expectations. It heralded a new normal of empowered employees who seek more autonomy, and of organizational resilience without taking success/market leadership for granted. For this emerging future, your investments in digital transformation shouldn’t be only considered as ‘crisis response’, but must hold their own and continue to evolve with the same urgency going forward, generating value beyond the pandemic.

Contact Us Today to Learn More About Intelligent Automation Digital Transformation

If you are looking to iron out bottlenecks or inefficiencies in your business processes through sustainable, intelligent automation, please contact us and our HyperApps experts will be happy to help you accelerate!

Learn more about our HyperApps approach >