NICE Actimize
Robotic Process Automation Improves Enterprise Risk Efficiency

How can technology transform investigations and other operational processes that remain manual, time-consuming, and expensive? Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence is the key to better resource utilization, increased accuracy, and productivity, and improved return on investment. Moreover, financial crime compliance and operations is one area that benefits dramatically from the utilization of an ‘intelligent automation’ approach to save costs and boost the effectiveness of compliance-related tasks and actions.

Leading the industry in financial crime and compliance solutions, NICE Actimize is investing heavily in these innovative approaches, integrating analytics and machine learning competencies into its financial crime and case management solutions to ensure greater efficiency and cost savings for clients. “Robotic Process Automation, when integrated with a robust case management platform, is both the present and future of financial crime compliance,” explains Chad Hetherington, VP and General Manager, Case Management, NICE Actimize, “Nearly 50 percent of a single financial crime investigator’s time is spent on manual tasks, and at least 30 percent of those tasks could be more efficiently handled by robotic process automation.”

RPA is one of the fastest growing operational concentrations for the enterprise today, with industry estimates predicting the market for RPA growing to $98.4 billion by 2020, according to Transparency Market Research. Rapidly adopted, it is estimated that about 28 percent of enterprises have already integrated some form of RPA, with at least 50 percent of organizations currently developing strategies to implement RPA for the first time, notes research from the Everest Group.

Hetherington explains, “Clients are very receptive to the notion that they can take greater advantage of their case management platforms, without implementing an entirely new tool, to consolidate internal and external data from multiple information sources into a single system, reducing the need for analysts to access multiple different applications during their investigations.”

A critical strength of this approach is based on the fact that even incremental enhancements to the data-gathering process can add up to huge collective savings of time, freeing up investigators to focus on real risks.

Robotic Process Automation, when integrated with a robust case management platform, is both the present and future of financial crime compliance

During NICE Actimize’s nearly two decades of history of working exclusively with financial crime, risk, and compliance teams, the firm has learned that reducing the effort placed into manual and mundane processes presents an opportunity to provide quick wins in terms of efficiency, productivity, costs, and risk as those areas are prime targets for automation. The NICE automation offerings currently serve around 400 customers, and the firm is now bringing the technology to the financial crime and compliance vertical market. Subsequently, NICE Actimize was recently recognized by Risk.net’s Operational Risk Awards, which honors excellence in operational risk management and regulation, with its 2017 Financial Crime Product of the Year accolade.

What distinguishes the NICE solution in the industry is that it permits the use of attended and unattended robots. The attended ‘robots’ are really digital assistants that live in the Case Manager on analysts’ desktops and collaborate with them as needed. These robots can be used on demand—like for copying and pasting or navigating between systems and screens—to help investigators complete their evidence gathering processes and arrive at a decision point faster and more accurately than previously possible. ‘Unattended’ robots work as the investigator's digital workforce, working 24/7 behind the scenes without human intervention. “We are showing clients that automation already lies within reach, and in some cases, it's really a question of optimizing what their investigations systems are already doing. Accomplishing more, with what you already have, is a great way to get comfortable with more advanced forms of automation,” concludes Hetherington.