The Development of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) For the Efficiency of Back Office Operations at Bank Muscat

Abstract

Achieving operational efficiency is a concern for the financial institutions especially banks. Robotic process automation is software that can be used to automate repetitive, rule-based processes. Employees in the bank’s back-office operations deal with high-volume of data every day. RPA is a new wave of technologies that is true to be adopted to improve efficiency, accuracy, productivity and reduce the operational costs. The purpose of this study is to expose the development of robotic process automation (RPA) within the bank for the efficiency of back-office operation processes. The survey was established as collected primary data for Bank’s employees to introduce RPA and analyses the current state of back-office operational. Additionally, interview was conducted within to identify the requirements of developing RPA based on the bank’s needs. Also, the challenges of adopting RPA has been analyzed within the present environment of the bank. The secondary data were collected from literature reviews on the RPA benefits and it is successful implementation within banking industry in order to highlight the positive implication of developing RPA and support primary data collected. The results indicate to develop RPA, the bank needs to analyses the basic requirements and overcome the challenges that would obstruct the developing of RPA. Also, bank should spread the knowledge of RPA with its benefits and involve the employees for the developments and training. This research will help the banks in Oman to make decisions on moving towards automation and digitalization to improve their quality of products/services that can be achieved by having efficient back-office processes.