Posted by Singapore: After Australia, India is second in RPA (robotic process automation) adoption in finserve in APAC as per a new survey.
While there’s a significant disparity of RPA adoption within Asia Pacific’s financial services industry, there’s also growing momentum in automation efforts by organisations across the region revealed the Blue Prism commissioned survey title RPA in the APAC Financial Services Sector.
In terms of RPA adoption (solutions and technologies) in finserve, India is second to Australia followed by Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore.
Australia leads within the region with 78% of organisations currently using RPA solutions and technologies, followed by India, Hong Kong and Malaysia with 49%, 47% and 44% of organisations leveraging RPA respectively.
Interestingly, the disparity in RPA adoption can be noted with Singapore lagging behind its neighbouring countries with 28% of its organisation using the RPA technologies and solutions as per the survey.
Respondents in Singapore (34%) and Malaysia (50%) indicated familiarity with RPA, which means there’s a potential for better comprehension and perception around this technology. This is much lower in comparison to respondents in Australia (85%), Hong Kong (84%) and India (75%) revealed the survey.
“While RPA adoption across global industries grew at tremendous speed, this report revealed the disparity of RPA adoption within the APAC financial services industry, indicating a long roadmap before the region reaches RPA and Intelligent Automation maturity,” said Robert Dewar, VP – Financial Services, APAC – Blue Prism.
“Presently, the use of RPA adoption remains largely a tool to improve efficiency and cut costs, rather than a catalyst to accelerate digital transformation,” noted Deward.
“As markets look to scale-up enterprise RPA and Intelligent Automation deployments, our aim is to empower companies to fulfil their vision for strategic business automation and achieve faster better organisational outcomes,” added Dewar.
Almost all of the organisations (95%) surveyed felt that RPA adoption has improved overall business operations, which includes error and cost reduction (7% each), workforce productivity to focus on higher-value tasks (24%) and increasing efficiencies and speed within the organisation (61%).
The report also revealed that across Australia, India, Singapore and Malaysia, the top two areas that companies leverage RPA are the finance and IT departments. This differs slightly in Hong Kong, where the top two areas are finance (79%) and customer service (71%) departments.
Within the next two to three years, companies in Australia and India expect to continue leveraging RPA the most in the finance and IT departments, while Hong Kong companies expect the same in the finance and customer service departments. In Malaysia, besides the finance department (61%), companies are prioritising RPA programmes in sales and marketing (73%) in the next two to three years.
Interestingly, the finance department was not included in the top three areas that Singapore companies will be leveraging RPA in the near term, with companies ranking IT departments (61%) as the top priority for RPA adoption, followed by sales and marketing (54%) and customer service (50%).
While India came second to Australia in RPA adoption in finserve, the survey also revealed findings on how Indian companies’ perspectives on the role, benefits and impact of RPA.
95% of organisations in India felt that RPA has improved overall business operations cost and time savings (83%) as the most significant benefit associated with RPA adoption. Respondents in India said that RPA act as a catalyst for driving digital transformation (76%).
In terms of factors that organisations consider when drawing up an RPA budget, most organisations ranked implementation costs (75%) as the most important factor, followed by maintenance costs (62%) and ancillary costs (44%).
Of the organisations in India that are not currently using RPA solutions and technologies (50%), 27% are planning to implement such technologies within the next six months, and 11% are planning to do so within the next year. However, the survey found that 93% of organisations backed future growth of RPA as promising.