RPA Success Stories in Banking: Carter Bank & Trust Achieves 3,800% ROI with Automate

Large commercial bank discovers more than 75 ways to automate manual processes

Carter Bank & Trust is a state-chartered community bank in Martinsville, Va. The company operates more than 100 branches in Virginia and North Carolina and has 1,000 employees.

Watch the video to get a snapshot of this RPA success story in banking and read on for more details.

 

 

Time-Intensive Processes

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A year into his new position as CIO of Carter Bank & Trust, Matt Speare realized his team was spending far too much time on routine, manual processes. From new employee onboarding and payroll to customer account maintenance, he knew there was a better way to handle many essential but inefficient and error-prone activities.

Early Wins

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Speare had used robotic process automation (RPA) software in a previous role and was eager to implement this type of solution for the team. The key requirements: flexibility, scalability, and ease of implementation and maintenance. They determined Fortra's RPA software, Automate, was up to the task. 

For the initial project list, the team put Automate to work on its new employee onboarding and payroll tasks. The previous processes included multiple employees manually establishing user access in Active Directory, managing training in the learning management system, and provisioning the Human Resources payroll system. Automate quickly took over all of these activities, running during a 24-hour period. 

Ongoing Progress

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Automate quickly scaled well beyond onboarding and payroll, handling server reboots, system migrations, 3rd-party SLA management, and data validation.

Speare was particularly impressed with how the Fortra solution handled the conversion of all the bank’s customer accounts. “We could never have conducted data validation and correction of erroneous account information without Automate. I don’t care if I had 100 people for a year, it never would have worked,” he said. “It allows you to crunch through a lot of the data and routine testing you’re doing over and over. It never gets tired. That’s why we love Automate.”

In addition, Automate assists with updating customer information when there are changes to their contact information, such as address and phone number changes. Once the new address has been entered in the data intake system, it also makes the change in the core system, eliminating the need for human oversight.

A Culture of Automation

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Carter Bank & Trust decided to incorporate ongoing automation as a corporate strategy due to its far-reaching impacts. They built this “automation first” culture by first creating a Center of Excellence. Today, more than 75 affectionately named “Carter bots” run processes around the company, each designed to save time and money. 

“We haven’t even touched the surface of all the things we can do with the Automate tool,” Speare said. To root out new opportunities, the IT team holds contests with prizes incenting employees to submit their ideas for leveraging automation. Employees can also access an internal webpage which Automate updates with the latest ROI for each scheduled job to make its value highly visible. 

Show-Stopping Results

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In the first five months, Carter Bank & Trust achieved 3,800% ROI with Automate and hopes to hit 5,000% by the end of year one. They have reallocated more than five full-time employees to other strategic projects and expect to net more than $50,000 in SLA claw-back annually. In addition, the effort of validating customer records took less than 40 hours of programming and less than three hours to run instead of the three weeks 20 people would have devoted to the effort.

Ready to Become One of the Next RPA Success Stories in Banking?

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