By Christophe Kosolowsky – Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can be traced to the early 2000s, but the technology entered mainstream Finance transformation solutions around 2015. To put this into context, a KPMG paper published in 2015 cited research that found only 12% of financial services firms had gone live with RPA solutions, 24% of firms were only talking about RPA and 43% hadn’t even thought about it. (source)

Flash forward to today and RPA, an umbrella term for software that can be easily programed to learn and then automate processes using structured inputs and logic, was valued at $1.8Bn in 2021 and expected to grow at double digit rates through 2024. (source). A mature vendor market has been established with providers like Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath broadening out their offerings and undertaking highly valued IPOs.

CFOs have long been considering how RPA can be applied to the Finance function and replicate the enormous value delivered by automating industrial processes. There are some emerging learnings from the last five years which can guide Finance Change leaders on how to maximize value from Finance RPA programmes.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, finance professionals started to seriously exploit the ability to write their macros and other automated routines in desktop-based software like Microsoft Excel and Access. These macros became ever more sophisticated, suffused by difficult to follow VBA code that would reside on the user’s C drive. For a while, these “End User Computer” solutions checked the better, faster, cheaper boxes. They gave finance access to more data, reduced reporting times and eliminated some manual work. But there were limitations because these EUCs lacked integration into a control framework and were technologically unstable.

After the collapse of Enron and the subsequent introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley regime in 2002, CFOs became personally accountable for the accuracy of their statutory returns which was incompatible with the proliferation of EUCs in Finance. The resulting audit and cleanup of EUCs was great for consulting firms but destroyed all the value delivered in the early days overnight.

The risk for robotics in Finance is exactly the same: if Finance departments just apply robots throughout the department it may initially make things a bit Better, Faster, Cheaper but will invariably result in expensive audit requirements in the not-so-distant future. Read On: