Blue Prism survey reveals untapped opportunities of RPA adoption rates in financial services industry across APAC

GELUMPAI.ID – Blue Prism® (AIM: PRSM), a global leader in intelligent automation, today released findings from its survey report titled “RPA In The APAC Financial Services Sector”.

While there is growing momentum in automation efforts by organisations across Asia Pacific (APAC), the report reveals significant disparity of robotic process automation (RPA) adoption within Asia Pacific’s financial services industry.

While Australia leads the way with 78 percent of organisations currently using RPA solutions and technologies, India is second with 49 percent, followed by Hong Kong (47 percent), Malaysia (44 percent) and Singapore (28 percent).

With only 34 percent in Singapore and 50 percent in Malaysia of respondents indicating familiarity with RPA, there is potential for better comprehension and perception around this technology.

This is in comparison to 85 percent in Australia, 82 percent in Hong Kong and 75 percent in India.

Robert Dewar, Vice President, Financial Services, APAC, Blue Prism, said that 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.

“Presently, the use of RPA adoption remains largely a tool to improve efficiency and cut costs, rather than a catalyst to accelerate digital transformation. 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,” Robert Said.

Almost all of the organisations (95 percent) surveyed felt that the adoption of RPA has improved overall business operations, which includes error and cost reduction (7 percent each), empowering the workforce to concentrate on higher value tasks (24 percent) and increasing efficiencies and speed within the organisation (61 percent).

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 percent) and customer service (71 percent) 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 percent), companies are prioritising RPA programmes in sales and marketing (73 percent) 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 percent) as the top priority for RPA adoption, followed by sales and marketing (54 percent) and customer service (50 percent).