The challenge

Standard Bank wanted an efficient way to identify the various personal and business account portfolios for each customer, view all account relationships, and understand the profitability of any given customer. However, with planning time, testing, programming, cost, and resources in consideration, Standard Bank wanted a better alternative than to manually organize the accounts and perform the thousands of necessary changes.

Not all of Standard Bank’s challenges were so large in scale. When customers open a new account with a Standard Bank employee, that employee’s responsibility code is assigned to the new account. The bank relies on the number to track customer follow-up and numerous other activities. In the event of a job change, each of those accounts would need to be reassigned to a different employee to ensure continuity of service. At up to 5,000 accounts per incident, the manual data maintenance work could take hours.

Additionally, an annual dormant debit card purge process required the bank to search manually for cards that had been unused for nine months or more and change their status to “closed.” At up to 10,000 cards per year and roughly one minute to perform the process for each card, the project could take over 150 employee-hours to complete.

The RPA solution

With the goals of improving productivity, efficiency, service, and profitability, Standard Bank & Trust Co. selected Nintex RPA to automate many of their tedious business processes.

Nintex RPA added flex fields and household numbers common to each account within and between customer portfolios. This figure helps Standard Bank associate the multiple accounts and portfolios that belong to individual customers and understand their true profitability. In a process considered impossible to complete by hand before Nintex RPA, the software performed the requisite 118,000 changes in just a few weeks. Nintex RPA still performs monthly maintenance work on new accounts at a rate of about eight records per minute.

Nintex RPA handles the bank’s responsibility code maintenance automatically and with ease. The software now updates the codes at a rate of about 8 per minute – a far cry from the hours of manual effort requires before – without error. “This value is in a drop-down menu in our core,” explained Stacy Kimpston, AVP at Standard Bank. “Nintex RPA can quickly and easily find and select a new value in that drop-down rather than having someone manually do that for us.”

Standard Bank’s annual debit card maintenance has been reduced from an over 150 hour-long manual process to a roughly five-hour automatic one. Nintex RPA can identify a card from among other dormant ones, locate it in Standard Bank’s system, and change that card’s status to closed in about two seconds, without any human intervention. Nintex RPA even assesses fees for lost cards or PIN requests.

“If a customer has lost their card and requests a new one, or if they request a PIN mailer, our representative adds a flex field to indicate the request,” said Kimpston. “At the end of the month, I run a report to see what customers have that flex field. Then I have Nintex RPA go into each account, assess a fee, and delete that flex field for the next month.”