Kevin Kroen, PwC | UiPath FORWARD III 2019

Kevin Kroen, FS Intelligent Automation Leader, PwC, sits with Dave Vellante at UiPath FORWARD III 2019 at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, NV.

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Q&A: Financial institutions lead the way for automation, but at what cost?

With the growing buzz around automation in the enterprise, the financial services sector is no stranger to the need for tools that effectively and efficiently solve problems. Where there was once a bigger focus on the investment of automation, there’s been a pivot toward considering the challenges of scale and change management. However, the industry continues to lead in the implementation of automation technology.

“[Our] view is that a well-functioning automation program should have both channels, and each channel should be informing the other,” said Kevin Kroen (pictured), partner of financial services advisory, digital, at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, when asked about enterprise and citizen-led channels emerging as the two-track approach to automation. “If citizens are coming up with ideas of things that they can automate themselves, that’s great, but those should also be contributed to the broader ecosystem. There may be grander ways to solve that problem, both from a technology perspective and from a process re-engineering perspective.”

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Vellante: Financial services has always been a leading indicator of technology adoption. I presume that automation is no different. You’re in the New York area; you’re belly to belly with the financial services companies, the big whales. What’s going on in FS these days?

Kroen: As we look across the financial services industry, they were one of the leaders with automation — more because the overarching business environment really forced them. We looked at the regulatory burden that a lot of our banking clients were under over the past decade, post-crash. That really has forced two things. One, it’s limited the amount of discretionary spend that they have to spend on really big technology transformation projects. It’s also forced a lot of margin pressure and have them think differently about how they can run their business at a much lower and more effective price point.

So that’s driven automation to the top. And when we’ve seen tools like UiPath and the broader RPA ecosystem becoming the right technology at the right time of being able to really embrace that right-sizing agenda in the financial services sector.

Vellante: You talked about three challenges, scale, the business case, and change management. They’re interrelated; is that part of the challenge with scale?

Kroen: It is part of the challenge. I think people that live in the RPA space day-to-day, to us it’s almost become second nature and like, “The technology’s not that complicated. This is very basic.” But you start going out to an entire organization, especially outside of technology, it’s new. And so change management’s really important.

We view from two lenses. One is really thinking about how do you upscale your workforce at a minimum so they know what technologies are actually out there. Doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to make everyone a bot-builder in your organization, but knowing what RPA is and knowing that, “Hey, I have some tools to go help solve a given business problem,” is really important. But the second point that we think is really important here is the ability to think about the long-term impact of the overall organizational model and how that actually adopts to using automation over time.

Vellante: You’re a thought leader; you work for one of the largest consultancies on the planet. You guys do some really great work. We talked about digital transformation; automation obviously plays in there, blockchain, AI, RPA, etc. Do you think that banks will lose control of payment systems?

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