St. James's Place sees potential for ‘exponential’ benefits with RPA

THE WHOLE STORY

St. James’s Place has completed their pilot phase, automating several processes in their core business and have seen some very encouraging results. The proof of concept (PoC) was done on the critical year calculation process working with the top 5 providers on a single pension plan. The target was to get all five partners in the trial completed in a month; however, the reality was that the process revealed itself to be more complex and only two were achieved in the month.

The complexity occurred in the document intake process relating to pensions from the different providers. The numerous documents were not standardized and the quality of the submissions varied enormously by partner. The ultimate solution had to overcome the technical challenges posed by these inputs and required the combination of OCR and data extraction tools to automate and complete the process. St. James’s Place learned many things during the PoC phase, including the need to involve IT as early as possible in the project to consider the impacts on IT infrastructure and leverage the skills already existing in the business. The company also discovered it was better to break processes down into manageable parts. They have now devised a complexity and feasibility calculator to help assess processes for automation. This provides building blocks to scale up in different parts of the organization and with different types of automation.

Within the investment division, they now have 3 processes live with a fourth nearly complete. Partner services and IT division are also onboarded, with 1 bot live each and more on the way.