Banks and credit unions often run on processes that haven’t changed in years. Staff spend hours copying data from spreadsheets into core systems, and manual validation creates bottlenecks that slow loan processes down.
BankRPA expert Robert Walters saw these issues up close during their years working at larger commercial banks. They’d watched automation transform operations … but they’d also seen something troubling.
“We saw that people were sometimes being sold things they didn’t need,” Walters explains. “Our goal was to be a trusted advisor for banks, using all of our banking and robotic process automation (RPA) knowledge, so we could steer them to the right path.”
That vision led to the launch of BankRPA, a strategic consulting firm dedicated to assisting financial institutions with their automation journey. While they work with multiple RPA vendors, their partnership with Nintex has proven especially powerful.
“Of all the vendors we work with, we really enjoy working with Nintex,” says Walters, who also serves as the company’s chief development officer. “We see the power in the product.”
Decades-old processes in a digital world
Bank customers today can deposit checks from their phones and open new accounts on tablets. Behind the scenes, though, many companies in the financial services industry still operate the way they did 20 years ago.
Their staff copy data from spreadsheets into core systems, validate information by hand across platforms, and work through queues that pile up overnight while no one’s there to process them.
While these tasks might seem like minor efficiencies on the surface, they snowball into major issues fast — pulling skilled employees away from work that needs actual human judgment or problem-solving.
BankRPA’s clients faced these exact kinds of bottlenecks. They got their work done, but at a cost: Think additional headcount and frustrated, dissatisfied employees. And as Walters knew from experience, there was a better way — prioritizing automation to see returns.
Putting automation to work
BankRPA’s philosophy is that automation should be accessible — not only for large enterprises with dedicated IT teams, but also for mid-sized institutions ready to modernize their operations.
That’s where Nintex RPA comes in. The platform lets organizations build low-code/no-code automated workflows using a drag-and-drop designer. Bots work alongside employees during business hours or run independently around the clock, handling repetitive tasks with accuracy.
BankRPA takes a collaborative approach, building solutions alongside their clients’ developers. As the BankRPA team works, client staff watch and learn, and then start building their own automations in the background. It’s a model that creates long-term self-sufficiency.
“The ease of use of Nintex software is what sets it apart,” Walters explains. “Once teams understand how it works and have a little bit of training, they can use it on their own, even without a professional company’s help.”
Here’s how BankRPA collaborated with four different financial institutions to solve their most pressing issues with Nintex RPA.
Reporting Social Security and Medicaid
When someone applies for Social Security or Medicaid, their information gets sent to banks across the country. If the applicant has an account there, the bank must provide detailed balance information for every month over the requested period — sometimes going back years.
For one BankRPA client, this meant staff manually pulling data from their core system and enterprise content management platform. A single request with six accounts could take around two hours of work, with employees typing monthly balances and accrued interest in Excel spreadsheets for each account.
BankRPA automated the entire procedure using Nintex RPA. Now, bots handle these requests automatically, saving their clients hours and freeing them up for other tasks.
“This approach could be used across every bank and credit union that participates,” says Walters. “While some bigger banks have this process automated, we’ve only seen one or two cases of that. So to me, this is a big win — and a little bit of configuration made it all happen.”
Issuing debit cards
One of BankRPA’s clients was processing 200 to 300 debit card requests each week. Every card required validation: Does the customer have an account? If so, are there fraud alerts? Has their address changed recently?
A team of two or three people worked through their queue all day. But requests kept flooding in after they went home at 5 p.m. When staff arrived at 8 a.m. the next morning, they’d face 20 or more debit cards waiting for validation — work they’d be dealing with until 10 a.m. before cards could even be printed.
The real pressure came at 3 p.m., when a daily deadline meant the team had to scramble through remaining requests. The bank regularly brought in two or three additional people just to meet this service level agreement.
BankRPA built a Nintex RPA bot that works around the clock. At 6 p.m. and 7 p.m., the bot processes new requests that came in after business hours. At 7 a.m., it checks for any additional requests and validates those, too.
“When users come in the morning, all of their validation work is done,” Walters says. “Those 30 or 40 items that they would have worked on in the morning are already validated.”
After two to three months of spot-checking the bot’s work, the company trusts it completely. Now they have complete confidence in issuing debit cards that the bot validated. The automation has essentially replaced one full-time employee plus several part-time staff.
Renewing CDs
Certificate of deposit (CD) renewals follow strict criteria and timelines. When staff came in each morning, they immediately had to work on processing CDs.
BankRPA has implemented a Nintex automation solution for this issue, starting with CDs pre-approved for automatic renewal. These are lower-risk transactions that follow predictable patterns. The bot processes these renewals overnight, so they’re completed before staff arrive.
Currently in user acceptance testing, the solution’s early results look promising … and work that used to wait until morning is done before employees walk in the door.
Managing Visa online tokens
Visa tokens are secure digital identifiers that replace your 16-digit account number during online transactions. If these unique codes aren’t being used, they need to be deactivated, or the bank gets charged for them.
One of BankRPA’s clients had to assign a staff member to pull tokens from a report and deactivate them one by one. That meant copying account numbers from Excel, pasting them into a website, and clicking through the deactivation process — again and again.
“Once a month, they had to complete an even larger batch of about 700 tokens,” says Walters.
In three or four days, BankRPA used Nintex software to automate the process, saving their clients stress and freeing up a staff member to work on pressing projects.
Results that add up
Across these four implementations, the impact went beyond saving time. BankRPA’s clients saw real operational challenges that freed up staff and offered a strong return on investment:
- Repurposed at least one full-time role: The SSA reporting automation managed the work of a full-time employee, while debit card validation eliminated the need for one FTE plus several part-time staff who helped handle peak times.
- Allowed for 24/7 processing without overtime. Bots don’t go home at 5 p.m. Overnight processing meant morning queues disappeared. Staff arrived to find validation work already complete, letting them focus on other tasks — say, tackling exceptions and customer service work — instead of data entry.
- Eliminated service level pressure. The 3 p.m. scramble for debit card processing is gone. No more pulling in extra staff to meet deadlines. The bot handles the workload consistently, whether it’s 20 requests or 200.
- Saved costs even beyond labor. Visa token automation cuts unnecessary billing charges by deactivating unused tokens daily.
- Built client confidence and self-sufficiency. By building solutions alongside client developers, BankRPA created teams that can tackle new automations on their own — especially with easy-to-use Nintex software.
Building trust through results
For BankRPA, these Nintex implementations show that achieving automation success is possible for financial institutions mired in old ways of operating. It just requires a strong partner with banking expertise and a platform that’s powerful enough to handle complex processes but accessible enough for internal teams to eventually own.
Ready to explore how Nintex RPA can transform your operations? Watch our free Nintex RPA webinar or connect with a BankRPA expert to discuss your specific challenges.
