Smart Automation, RPA  /  Bank

Implementation of an automated process for checking and validating stock market orders

This private bank decided to embark on an automation project to make its staff more efficient by sparing them certain repetitive tasks. The goal is to ensure greater reliability and security in the control and validation of certain sensitive transactions.

The client's challenges and objectives

CMB Monaco is a leading international private bank based in Monaco since 1976, and part of the Mediobanca group. CMB Monaco chose Novelis to support its various automation projects.

As part of its control operations, the bank must reconcile stock market orders with confirmations received from counterparties before validating them. Therefore, an automated process for checking and validating stock market orders was implemented to save time and secure transactions.

The manual process required the daily involvement of 2 operators who had to reconcile orders with confirmations received from various counterparties. This process involved handling 4,000 to 6,000 orders per day during the COVID crisis. These tasks imposed a significant time burden on the team, and hiring an additional full-time equivalent FTE was not feasible during this crisis phase. Consequently, the bank opted for RPA to automate tasks and alleviate the pressure on the teams.

Our achievements

Teams are not scalable when faced with an increase in activity and order quantity. Agents are responsible for verification, data entry, and correction tasks, leading to an escalation in operational risk. In contrast, robots can operate beyond regular working hours, allowing better control of risks by standardizing these tasks.

By eliminating the need for transaction entry, agents can redirect their focus to higher value-added tasks, such as analysis. The result is a significant increase in productivity. This aligns with the expectations for operations in a world of limited resources. Furthermore, all of this is digitalized with additional reporting tools.

The robot was able to integrate files in 2 different formats: either via Swift (the secure international network used by financial institutions to exchange information and carry out banking transactions worldwide) or via Excel for certain management companies that did not have Swift technology. This has enabled CMB to cover many of their counterparties, and in a very short space of time the robot is able to compare 14 to 15 criteria on orders against confirmations. It can confirm or reject the validation of an order and will record this in a report generated every hour.

In addition, the CMB did not have the possibility of carrying out this manual reconciliation on all transactions because it represented too much work. Today, thanks to the robot, the CMB is able to check all its orders against the counterparties it receives. For a single order, the reconciled data comes from around twenty different screens in the Core Banking application.

In the event of a compliant check, the order is automatically validated in the system in an average of 10 minutes. In this way, the bank ensures full compliance with regulations.

To automate this process, Novelis has set up an automatic reconciliation that checks the presence of an order in the Swifts (MT515) received, the conformity of the information on both sides and finally generates a report for the department in charge of validation (indicating the checks carried out and the discrepancies noted).

Results

2 key success factors have been identified:

1/Employees: Employees are the first key success factor. In fact, automation must not be imposed, it must be embraced by the department and the business. The robot and the employee work hand in hand. Automation is integrated into the very heart of the team. The robot only provides support, help and assistance and does not replace a human service!

2/Iterative approach: The processes are fairly complex, so the brick-by-brick approach enabled us to deliver the first functionalities quickly and continue to develop the automated process as the project progressed. This iterative approach was essentially driven by the employees, who carried out the actions on a daily basis.

Following the automation of the process for checking and validating stock market orders, the following results were observed:

  • 100% of orders checked / 70% automatically counted (30% of non-compliant orders)
  • No orders validated after their value date
  • Process handled by a single robot between 7am and 7pm
  • Orders checked in just 1 minute
  • Better management thanks to the dashboard

Novelis' added value

Our expertise in Intelligent Automation

Through our expertise in RPA, AI, NLP and IDP, we are able to help our clients to deliver efficient automation projects: Intelligent Automation.    

This means taking into account a general vision of the technology and its contributions in order to deliver a relevant solution to manage both structured and unstructured data, always with the concern of being aligned with the IT roadmap and impacting the economic performance (ROI). 

In addition to our software robots, we also add a particular expertise in the “process mining” or “process assessment” dimension in order to allow the rapid identification of processes and tasks to be automated in priority.   

Our Business Analysts complete this system in the capacity to propose a high vision of the potential of the technology, the investments to be made, the architectures to be deployed and of course the expected ROI. 

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Riad Lachelak

Head of Operations​ - CMB Monaco

With the Novelis teams, we were able to transform a legal restriction into an opportunity: for our back-office teams, who were freed from very time-consuming tasks, and also from a financial point of view, as the automation offered us an unparalleled level of compliance and revenue generation. Novelis was able to support the change with the employees and the phased approach allowed us to put the first automated processes into production very quickly. Automation is a true value-creating lever that all companies should implement!