Robotic process automation (RPA) has been a hot topic and trending buzzword within financial services in recent years, and for a good reason. Automation bots can be efficient, nonstop sources of assistance for the completion of redundant and/or repetitive manual tasks. The growth of this market is no secret, either. Recent figures project a compound annualized growth rate (CAGR) of the RPA market to nearly 35 percent through 2022. Despite the advantages that come with RPA, however, approximately 60 percent of decision-makers at companies adopting automation cite data quality as their top challenge when implementing the technology.

Generally speaking, an enterprise should seek to create a data environment that is realistically suitable for RPA technology to eventually make decisions on its own. Only then will enterprises be able to layer artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) on top of RPA to optimize their business processes further and capitalize on intelligent process automation (IPA) opportunities. 

This paper focuses specifically on creating an automation center of excellence (CoE) in large-scale financial institutions (FIs).