With lessons learned from the pandemic and AI accelerating progress, UK-based merchant banking group Close Brothers is augmenting its RPA by pulling data from unstructured documents to not only enable end-to-end process transformation, but give customers peace of mind.
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Close Brothers has been on an RPA journey for more than six years, and much of its work in this area has focused on automating rules-based, structured processes. But Stephen Durnin, the company’s head of operational excellence and automation, says the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic thrust automation around unstructured input, like email and documents, into the spotlight.
“We provide support, which we call forbearance within the banking sector, to customers in the form of a payment holiday if they’re struggling to meet their financial obligations,” Durnin says. “With a high number of customers furloughed at the time, it was important that we were able to lend support at scale and in a …