People's United Bank Is on the Path to a Citizen-Led RPA Development, with a Core CoE to Support and Provide Governance.

People’s United Bank democratizes RPA development with business developers across the enterprise after successful implementations for M&A processes and to handle a high volume of CARES ACT SMB PPP loans—improving CX, operational efficiency and productivity.

People’s United Bank is a community-based, regional Northeast United States bank with more than 5,500 employees and over 400 retail locations in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. The bank offers commercial and retail banking, along with wealth management services. The bank is dedicated to putting customers first, with a focus on making practical, forward-looking investments in technology, along with strong organic and acquisition-based growth. The company understands the importance of integrating technology to enhance the customer experience. Integrating technology also helps their team deliver a high-quality, multi-dimensional service approach.

People’s United Bank started their first robotic process automation (RPA) pilot with loss prevention group, then extending RPA to use bots as part of their M&A strategy. The first major success was using unattended bots to help with conversion activities after the acquisition of United Bank. Typically, merging customer online profiles would take three weeks of manual work. With a UiPath bot, this work was completed in 24 hours. Automating the online profile process was important because it impacts customers directly, affecting the customer experience (CX). 

In another automation, the bot took over the deposit operations process of manually comparing customer profiles to look for discrepancies—a process that used to take humans 10–15 minutes per profile and would take three to five weeks to compare, sometimes requiring temporary staff. The bot was able to compare and merge 8,000 customer profiles in under 48 hours. Profiles that couldn’t be merged due to discrepancies were then handed off to a human to handle with details around the issue. Because the bot forwarded complete details, it was a lot easier for workers to complete the task, significantly cutting down processing time even when humans were involved. The bank can now use these processes for any future acquisitions, providing cost savings and predictability.  

We've put a bot into what was a manual process when we started. And the pace of closing and funding the [SBA PPP] loans has picked up markedly.

John P. Barnes • Chairman and CEO, People's United Bank

RPA streamlines loan processing during COVID-19

Due to the success of these two M&A processes, when COVID-19 hit and the CARES Act was passed, People’s United decided to utilize UiPath bots to streamline some of the SBA PPP loan processes. They automated processes such as loan document printing and helped operations through the unpresented volume of loans that came from the program. ​

Citizen developers leading the way into 2021

People’s United Bank is now well on its way to citizens development, with a core CoE to support and provide governance. There are currently 75 resources being trained using UiPath Academy, and by the end of 2020, the banks goal was to have 100. This will include ten active teams: four in operations, one in audit, one in risk, one in IT, one in EPMO, one in finance, and one in retail banking. ​

By using RPA we can suddenly do 100% of what we wanted to do but didn’t have the resources to do.

Rasa Malish • VP, Process Improvement and Automation, People's United Bank