MyState Bank Super Charges Automation Journey with RPA

With an aim to transform its business through automation, Australia’s MyState Bank leveraged robotic process automation (RPA) to improve customer experience, customer satisfaction and reduce costs and errors, inspiring employees along the way.

Headquartered in Hobart, the capital city of Australia’s island state of Tasmania, MyState Bank is a wholly owned subsidiary of MyState Limited, a national diversified financial services group that offers products and services designed to simplify the way its customers manage money. From personalized insights to auto-savings solutions, it helps over 145,000 customers take control of their finances daily.

In 2019, MyState Bank set a goal to become more digitally enabled to attract more customers by making the business simpler, more relevant, and accessible. Ultimately, the company wanted its service to be easier to use, resulting in better customer outcomes.

To help achieve this goal, MyState Bank focused on creating operational efficiency by implementing automation across the business. The main objectives of automation were to reduce costs and errors, maintain compliance, and improve the overall customer experience and satisfaction.

RPA became the clear means of supercharging its automation efforts and achieving these objectives, as other options would have been very costly, and time prohibited.

Sudhir Iyer, Systems Technical Manager at MyState Bank, sheds light on the decision to begin using RPA across the business:

We wanted to free up the work on manual processes and allow our staff to do more cognitive work to support our customers. Automation was always a solution, but we needed to be able to implement this with speed and within budget. We read enough about RPA and understood it had a lot of potential—putting us in the driver’s seat and taking automation hands on.

Sudhir Iyer • Systems Technical Manager

Beginning with the back office

After identifying RPA as its solution to improve overall customer experience, MyState wanted to move quickly. Before jumping in, the company decided to run a pilot to test the effectiveness of RPA using the basic trial of UiPath Studio, Orchestrator, and Robots. The pilot centered on a rule-based process in the back office, which was heavy in repetitive, manual activities.

The process involved amending errors in the customer payment process. When customers made payments to accounts outside MyState, there was a potential of an error occurring with the chosen account. For example, they could have the account number wrong, or the beneficiary could have closed the account. This meant the money would be returned to MyState, but it wouldn’t return to the specific customer’s account. The operational support team would receive a report of which customers needed to be manually reimbursed funds back to their account.

Before the UiPath pilot, this process could take up to four days. Using RPA, MyState reduced the turnaround time to same day.

We’re glad we automated this process as it achieved the right balance between effort and ease. It ticked all the boxes for an ideal pilot supporting our extremely ruled-based, and repetitive tasks. It was exactly what we needed to see the impact and cost saving opportunities from RPA.

Sudhir Iyer • Systems Technical Manager

From back office to business-wide automation

After testing a successful pilot with UiPath, MyState formed an internal RPA team, including two junior developers and one lead developer to liaise with the internal process excellence team called MyExcellence. The MyExcellence team put a call out across the organization and identified several opportunities across the business, including financial operations, fraud and risk lending operations, rate appeal requests and even a COVID-19 specific bot.

In total, MyState automated more than 20 processes across the business using unattended bots, UiPath Automation Hub and Task Capture, Studio, Orchestrator and Robots. But being a financial institution security was a major priority for MyState. The company adopted a zero-tolerance approach to RPA. Its bots went through vigorous risk and compliance reviews, making sure bots were no different to a human staff member in terms of identity. For example, MyState ensured that bots went through password resets, so humans couldn’t pretend to be a bot. To maintain a secure platform, MyState guarantees it has real-time visibility of all bots and all activity is tracked.

While it did take some time for them to understand what an RPA process was, our staff members have truly embraced automation over the years. We always encourage them to come forward with an automation idea.

Sudhir Iyer • Systems Technical Manager

Once RPA was rolled out throughout the business, MyState was surprised with the engagement. As Sudhir Iyer recalls, “Staff embraced RPA very positively and with a lot of zeal. We were lucky there.” In the back office, RPA freed up the staff to work on tasks that required more cognitive thinking. It further inspired them to think about automation in their daily tasks.

The impact of automation has been felt very positively across the business. After the RPA implementation, we were surprised there was a higher engagement between business and technology for automation processes. There was a significant increase in appetite for automation and smarter methods.

Sudhir Iyer • Systems Technical Manager

Upskilling through UiPath Academy

When MyState started their RPA journey, they had one developer who had an appetite for learning automation. From there, they hired graduates from both Navitas Professional and the University of Tasmania with degrees in information technology.

The entire learning and training of new employees is through the UiPath Academy. The Academy offers free online RPA training and certification. The MyState team took advantage of the training and now all of their internal staff who work on the UiPath Platform are UiPath certified.

What attracted us to UiPath was its leading RPA product and the fact that it was the only vendor that had a free academy training. We knew that if we had to do things in RPA ourselves, we would have to self-learn and put ourselves at the forefront. The UiPath community forum gave access to a wiki-type community engagement which helped solve our day-to-day problems.

Sudhir Iyer • Systems Technical Manager

Automating more and more

Following its successful RPA program, MyState will be looking to continue automating more processes across the business. One area of focus for future automations is the optical character recognition, which will allow MyState to expand RPA into other areas of the business. MyState will also continue to work with local universities to help educate and skill students interested in RPA. MyState also plans to continue engagement via Navitas Professional internship programs to offer a chance to ICT graduates to learn and apply RPA to solve real-life problems specific to its banking.

Automation is a broader mandate within the technology division of MyState. RPA will definitely be a key component as a tool to achieve automation.

Sudhir Iyer • Systems Technical Manager