Commercial Bank of Ceylon, a leader in tech-based banking products and services, recently won the Banking and Financial Services Category Award presented by the Sri Lanka Association for Software Services Companies (SLASSCOM) for its case study on robotic process automation (RPA). 

The RPA award for the category was presented to the bank for its end-to-end automation of the credit card on-boarding process, launched to improve the customer experience and reduce operational costs. Commercial Bank’s case study won one of 10 multi-sector awards at the latest edition of SLASSCOM’s annual conference titled ‘Digital Genesis’. The bank won in the same category last year too, for its User ID Management function, which automates key human resources management request processes.

Commercial Bank’s automated credit card processing system enables staff to track the progress of credit card applications and automate customer notifications, authorises users to view the Credit Information Bureau (CRIB) reports instantly, enables applications to conveniently consume the CRIB reports via internal API, eliminates repetitive data entering and reduces user data input errors.

This automation process has drastically reduced the average card processing time from 10 days to three days and the average time of acquiring a CRIB report from 12 minutes to two minutes, the bank said. The project also facilitated substantial cost savings for the bank by streamlining the processes.

Before automating the credit card on-boarding process, the bank’s staff had to work on six different systems to submit a single credit card application. Moreover, the manual processing also involved delays due to multiple data entry and manual CRIB report requests and analysis, the bank said. It also incurred additional and unnecessary costs due to requesting and printing the same CRIB reports multiple times throughout the branch network.