Once the process of assembling and training a team of robotics experts was underway, the search began to find suitable processes within the myriad of tasks and activities undertaken by the Transaction Banking unit that might be suitable candidates for the initiative.
Titti continues: “We were on the lookout for manual tasks that were governed by a defined set of business rules and had high volumes to begin with. We weren’t interested in tasks that happen twice a month in low volumes but rather processes that are frequent and repetitive. From the outset we targeted processes that were only or mostly digital. Later on, we started to look more broadly and find ways to simplify processes and make them digital to a larger extent. Many of the technical capabilities that needed to be in place were created in parallel as well in the bank, making it easier over time to speed up implementation.”
Becoming excellent
In response to the various robotics initiative springing up in different business units across the bank, Nordea established the Robotics Centre of Excellence to develop a centralised framework, leverage knowledge and create an overall governance model. Nordea’s Robotics Centre of Excellence absorbed the Transaction Banking ‘satellite’ initiative already underway as well as those from other areas of the bank, taking full Nordea wide responsibility for managing and developing robotics projects across the organisation.
Jacob Ejdelind, Senior Business Analyst, Robotics Execution, at Nordea, says: “At Nordea we define robotics as a software which in simple terms can be described as an extended macro functionality. For example, rather than a human opening a Contact Management System (CMS) and creating a note or updating an information point, this action is completed by a robot, utilising the same infrastructure and application as a human would do. Basically, we create fast IT macros that can do a bit more than just a standard data manipulation in Excel for instance.”
Titti explains: “If you look at the screen tool and simplify it a bit, it looks like someone is clicking through the different applications that a human would normally do but in a very speeded up way. The software is the tool that is used to actually make robotics and that interacts with the particular application(s) that are used in relation to the different kinds of processes.”