Supercharging Banking Operations: Power Platform's Massive Business Influence

Banks were already struggling with pre-crisis challenges such as low-profit margins, revenue pressure, and disruption caused by FinTech players. They may also have to face headwinds in the coming months to withstand the distress caused by both microeconomic and macroeconomic conditions. Therefore, it becomes imperative for banking institutions to address the knee-jerk reactions that come with three key areas to focus on – business process automation (BPA), adapting to Low-code to improve agility and stay resilient, and improving customer experience through intelligent chatbots.

Additionally, Banks and Credit Unions (CUs) require the ability to consolidate data from different sources and access it through a simple, intuitive interface to monitor financial markets and make actionable decisions. The good news is that Microsoft Power Platform has emerged as a holistic solution for banking institutions to cater to their end-to-end automation, low-code application development, virtual conversational, and data visualization requirements.

A Quick Overview of Microsoft Power Platform

Power Platform is a suite of Microsoft products designed to drive innovation, reduce costs, and improve operational efficiency. Using this robust solution, banks can automate manual and recurring tasks, analyze huge volumes of data and extract meaningful insights, build enterprise-grade applications in a quick turnaround time, and drive workforce productivity with AI-powered chatbots. In other words, Microsoft Power Platform can deliver exceptional results when used holistically. Now, let’s dig deeper into how banking institutions can use Microsoft Power Platform to simplify the customer experience, achieve operational excellence, and save a substantial amount of effort, time, and money.

Power Platform Use Cases for Banks

1. Customer Onboarding

Today, a large number of banks rely on the manual paper-based process for onboarding new customers. This not only consumes a significant amount of time but also reduces the productivity of banking staff. Using Power Apps, banking institutions can streamline the custom onboarding journey and create digital forms to collect basic customer information such as name, age, contact number, address, sex, demographics, product/service preferences, and a few more. Besides this, banks can create automated workflows using Power Automate to upload all the data to a central repository and manage customer relationships accordingly. Creating automated workflows provide the required agility and adds value to such routine and tedious processes.

2. Customer Engagement

Omni-channel customer experience is the need of the hour for customers trying to interact with the banks through the web, mobile applications, and social platforms. Using Power Virtual Agents, banking institutions can build intelligent chatbots to meet their conversational needs. The best part of AI-powered chatbots is that they don’t require any coding expertise and can engage conversationally with customers and employees resulting in improved customer engagement and increased workforce productivity.

3. Customer Portals

The demand for self-service applications is thriving across industries, and banking is no exception. Using Power Apps, Banking Institutions and Credit Unions (CUs) can build user-friendly portals that enable customers to check the eligibility criteria for a loan approval application, submit requests for service information, look up account details securely, and more. Since Banks and Credit Unions (CUs) deal with highly confidential data, it is unlikely that customer portals will replace the dedicated support systems that Banks and CUs have in place however Power Apps Portals can be leveraged for lower-level use cases such as raising customer support tickets, asking common questions, etc.

4. Loan Processing Automation

Another key area where Power Platform can be used by Banking Institutions and CUs is loan processing. There are several activities in loan processing that need to be expedited with the rising competition from NBFC and other FinTech players. However, faster loan processing is not as simple as it seems, since Banks and CUs need to verify the details of customers, calculate the eligibility, determine the default risk ratio, and then finally request approvals. All these time-consuming tasks extend the loan approval and processing. The good news is that Banks and CUs can automate loan processing by replacing a loan service agent with a self-service application/virtual agent. Besides this, Power Automate workflows can be used to define the rules and conditions in the knowledge base so that the workflow triggers the notifications or alerts when predefined conditions are met.

5. Internal Collaboration

Banks and Credit Unions (CUs) operate with cross-functional departments such as retail banking, loan processing, risk management, Forex, IT, and more. In most cases, these departments work independently and are siloed. With the help of Power Platform and Common Data Service, Banking Institutions and CUs can not only break down the silos between these departments but also provide them with a unified view of the customers.

Summing Up

In a highly regulated industry like BFSI, Power Platform adoption can be a game-changer for Banks and Credit Unions (CUs) since it can help them increase their user base, reduce complexity, simplify the user experience, improve operational efficiency, and drive a higher ROI. If you are also operating a business in the banking domain and planning to embrace this robust suite of tools for streamlined onboarding, business process automation & management, manual process automation, customer engagement, and approvals management, you may consider partnering with an expert.