McKinsey predicts that within the next few years, automation will fulfill 10-25% of bank business processes. This should increase the capacity of financial institutions and enable staff to focus on more challenging tasks that require creativity and complex problem-solving.

Today, automation in the finance industry isn’t only about online insurance payments or invoice automation. It leverages the capacity of artificial intelligence and extensive integrations to handle big data, provide five-star customer support, and deliver personalized notices.

The use of automation to optimize offline communications is gaining particular popularity. By integrating advanced CRM systems with mail automation software, financial services can automatically print and deliver personalized notifications and documents.

To learn more about automating customer communication in the finance industry for banks, insurers, and mortgage lenders, read on:

• Main trends and approaches to automation in the finance industry
• Billing, notices, and invoice automation for banks, insurers, and mortgage lenders

Main Trends and Approaches to Automation in the Finance Industry

The financial sector is heavily based on hundreds of routine and repetitive processes. To handle a customer request, provide a credit card, process a purchase order, or complete any other operation, financial institutions do the same things over and over.

Starting from the first ATM designed in the 60ies, financial services are striving to automate as much as possible. Fortunately, with technology advancement, the pace of automation in the finance industry has significantly accelerated. Nowadays, there are multiple automation approaches that can add to your company’s bottom line:

• Online insurance payments. Online insurance payments can be processed both through a third-party payment service or an internal platform of an insurer. Such software partially automates the payment process, enabling consumers to manage their contributions and avoid late payments. On the flip side, thanks to online insurance payments, insurers can reduce manual work and free their staff for more critical tasks.
• Automatic payments and billing. With this type of automation in the finance industry, consumers can choose to automatically pay recurring bills on a scheduled date. Similarly to online insurance payments, automatic billing is equally beneficial to payers and financial institutions.
• Invoice automation. Invoice automation is a part of an AP automation strategy that optimizes invoice processing lead time. It helps businesses and financial services to render, process, deliver, and track invoices. Invoice automation also works for paper invoices that can be automatically printed and shipped to the right person.
• Automated customer experiences. Robotic process automation (RPA) can cover almost all stages of the customer journey, including account onboarding, maintenance, and closing. RPA solutions don’t require coding skills or deep technical expertise. Thus, any financial organization can easily launch such software to optimize the collection, validation, and transfer of information.
• Anti-laundering and customer analysis. Finance services spend crazy money resourcing teams of analysts who study transaction alerts and conduct Know Your Customer checks. Up to 50% of their time, they just collate data instead of focusing on the decision-making process. Virtual workforce can help banks to decrease the load on analysts and process a large volume of requests much quicker.
• Automated online and offline notifications. Communication is key to transparent relationships between financial institutions and consumers. It’s also critical to meet the requirements of financial regulations and stay compliant. CRMs and marketing automation tools, including Inkit’s direct mail automation, enable financial services to fully automate generation and delivery of notices.

By automating these processes, you can increase operational efficiency and enhance customer experiences. As if it wasn’t enough, automation also reduces expenses. According to estimates, by 2030, artificial intelligence (AI) will cut operating costs by 22%.

Yet before implementing specific payment, billing, or invoice automation practices, make sure to develop a solid strategy. Consider different approaches and tools to prioritize the stages of automation and do everything step by step. We recommend starting with automated communications as one of the most effective ways to boost your financial services.

Billing, Notices, and Invoice Automation for Banks, Insurers, and Mortgage Lenders

Out of multiple approaches to automation in the finance industry, notices and invoice automation are life-critical. Every single day, financial institutions deliver millions of messages related to online insurance payments, invoice approval, credit cards, transactions, and tons of other operations. These communications are the backbone of business processes. That’s why today we offer you an overview of what types of notifications can be automated by banks, insurers, and mortgage lenders and how to implement such automation in the finance industry.

Bills and invoice automation for banks

With the shift to electronic invoices, most banking institutions complement paper invoices and bills with online communications. There are also push-up notifications displayed in online banking systems to update users on the success of their transactions, security alerts, verification requests, etc. All these types of notices have different levels of formality and all of them can be automated. Pop-ups serve solely informative and validation goals. Electronic invoices are used to go paperless and exchange messages in real-time. Even though they have legal force, direct mail is still a preferred channel to deliver critical communications.

Document processing and automated notifications for insurers

An insurance company with 800,000 policies produces 25,000–30,000 documents per day. If counted together with customers’ documents it needs to process, the yearly volume may reach up to 6-7 million items. Without the optimization of document processing, insurers would never be able to deal with such a workload. The use of software robotics, AI, and machine learning solutions allows them to benefit from invoice automation, automated online insurance payments, fraud-analysis, investment accounting, and RPA-powered customer experience. Moreover, in addition to official communications, insurance companies also utilize marketing automation to promote their property, social, liability, life insurance, and other services.

Insurance automation in the finance industry is very similar to banking automation. There are custom tools for online insurance payments with push-notifications and chatbots. More important communications are delivered by electronic mail, whereas for highly official notices, direct mail remains the top channel.

Regular notifications for mortgage lenders

Mortgage companies have a narrower target audience than banks and insurers. Therefore, they deliver fewer types of communications and usually don’t integrate complex online billing software. In most cases, notifications are delivered through email or direct mail and related to the customer’s mortgage, delinquency issues, policy updates, and refinancing opportunities. Data accuracy and personalized content are the primary demands for effective automation of mortgage notices.

Automation in the Finance Industry: How to Automate Invoicing and Notifications?

When it comes to online billing, notifications, and invoice automation, the choice is huge. For example, to automate invoice processing, delivery, and invoice capture, you can use Horizon ERP, Swipez Billing, or MargERP 9+. These are popular solutions adopted by financial institutions to let you pay your bills online. For automation of email notifications, try any email automation tool that integrates with your database.

To automate both digital and paper invoices at once, subscribe to Inkit. This API integration platform enables companies to connect their databases, billing tools, and other software with the mail automation functionality. It stores digital copies of all print invoices delivered to customers and allows banks to synchronize their online and offline communications. Inkit also supports variable data printing to produce personalized notifications and tailored mail.

What to learn how Inkit’s automation can be used for automation in the finance industry? Contact us to discuss your needs.