ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank, today announced the deployment of ‘Software Robotics’ in over 200 business processes across various functions of the bank. The bank is the first in the country and among few, globally, to deploy ‘Software Robotics’ that emulates human actions to automate and perform repetitive, high volume and time consuming business tasks cutting across multiple applications.
ICICI Bank has deployed these software robots in over 200 business process functions across the organisation including retail banking operations, agri-business, trade & forex, treasury and human resources management among others. The bank has implemented the ‘Software Robotics’ platform mostly in-house, leveraging recent advancements in artificial intelligence such as facial and voice recognition, natural language processing, machine learning and bots among others.
Announcing the deployment of ‘Software Robotics’, Chanda Kochhar, MD & CEO, ICICI Bank, said, “ICICI Bank has a legacy of pioneering innovations in technology in banking to create propositions that provide increased convenience to customers. We have created new paradigms in the financial services industry by taking the lead in introducing path-breaking innovations including internet banking, mobile banking, Tab banking, Touch Banking branches and banking on social media.”
“It is yet another proud moment for us as we bring forth the futuristic technology of ‘Software Robotics’. This initiative marks a milestone in the banking innovation in the Indian banking industry as it joins a select group of overseas organizations which have deployed this unique state-of-the-art robotic technology in such a large way”, she added.
The software robots have reduced the response time to customers by up to 60 percent and increased accuracy to 100 percent thereby sharply improving the bank’s productivity and efficiency. It has also enabled the bank’s employees to focus more on value-added and customer-related functions. The software robots now perform over 10 lakh banking transactions every working day.
The software robots are configured to capture and interpret information from systems, recognize patterns and run business processes across multiple applications to execute activities including data entry and validation, automated formatting, multi-format message creation, text mining, workflow acceleration, reconciliations and currency exchange rate processing among others.
This launch comes close on the heels of a slew of technology-led innovative services introduced by the bank. The list includes fully automated and round-the-clock ‘Touch Banking’ branches, Tab Banking, banking on Facebook and Twitter, the country’s first contactless debit and credit cards, ‘Pockets’- India’s first digital bank on mobile phone and ‘iMobile SmartKeys’ – Asia’s first payment service using a smartphone keyboard.