Majority of Korean smartphone owners use mobile payment service

Most South Korean smartphone users have used mobile payment system and they plan to do so more because of its convenience. 

According to a poll conducted by local market tracker DMC Media on Tuesday, 79.1 percent of the 282 respondents said they used mobile payment service such as Samsung Pay and Kakao Pay at least once over the last six months. Of all female respondents, 87.3 percent had the experience, 14.9 percentage points more than 72.4 percent of male users. 

The mobile simple payment service was in the highest use by those who are in their 30s as 85.7 percent of the 30-something respondents said they used the service, followed by those in their 20s with 82.4 percent and 40s with 68.5 percent. 

About eight out of 10 respondents said they opted for the easy payment system via mobile devices due to its convenience. The second most common reason, with 42.2 percent response rate, was no need to carry physical cash or plastic cards, followed by promotional benefits (35.0 percent) and simple registration (34.1 percent). 

More than half of the respondents, 60.5 percent, said they are willing to make more payments using mobile wallets, and 38.6 percent would maintain their current usage. Just 0.9 percent said they would cut down the use of mobile payment. 

“Users place great importance on service convenience and security when it comes to mobile payment,” according to an official from DMC Media. “Service providers need to improve features related to private information protection and transaction reliability.”

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5 Fintech Stocks to Watch Ahead

The fintech industry is a booming one that is growing rapidly. As technology continues to lead to evolution in the finance industry, more opportunity arises for the companies that are on the leading edge of this evolution.

While there is a vast number of stocks to choose from in the space, there are a few that are offering what appear to be the largest opportunities.

PayPal is one of the largest companies in the fintech sector, with a market cap of more than $125 billion, and it doesn't look like the company is going to stop growing any time soon. The allure to PayPal is multifold, catering fintech services to millennials, entrepreneurs and those looking for security in online purchases.

As one of the first in the fintech space, PayPal has a brand that is second to none of its peers, giving it the ability to take a large share of a massive market. In fact, the peer-to-peer payments industry is expected to grow to be worth well over $300 billion annually by 2022. Moreover, the digital payments market is expected to grow to be worth $8 trillion by 2020 .

It's also worth mentioning that PayPal is the owner of Venmo, a peer-to-peer payments app that has taken the market by storm. In fact, the company is one of the two top contenders in the peer-to-peer payments battle , competing with the likes of Zelle.

It is argued that the app is doing so well because it is not only backed by the strength and security that PayPal has to offer, it is designed with the millenial in mind. Millenials are the largest audience in the peer-to-peer payments industry, so Venmo's hold on that market is great for PayPal and its investors.

Finally, it's important to keep in mind that while the digital payments market is a massive one, and PayPal is a household name, it actually only takes a small percentage of that market . With the company's leadership role in peer-to-peer payments and expertise in the digital payments sector, there is strong potential for growth ahead.

With PayPal being on the forefront of the peer-to-peer payments and digital payments markets, and a brand that is recognized by the masses, the company is likely to continue to take a large share of these markets. As a result, we can expect to see strong growth from the stock ahead.

Mogo Finance Technology (MOGO)

Mogo Finance Technology is a Canadian fintech play that is one of the most compelling opportunities in the fintech Space, for several reasons.

First and foremost, no matter what metric you look at, the company is highly undervalued compared to its peers. For example, looking at market cap, investors have given the company a value of only $75 per member, of which the company has 800,000. Chime, a challenger in the U.S., recently raised money at a $1.5 billion valuation , and N26 raised funds at a $2.7 billion valuation . This puts their value-per-user at $500 and $1,174, respectively. With similar metrics and a market cap of just under $65 million, highly undervalued doesn't quite explain the situation at Mogo.

Nonetheless, it's not enough to just say that a company is undervalued. There's got to be more of a reason to be interested, and when it comes to Mogo, there is. The company is quickly emerging as a leader in the Canadian fintech space - a space with under a half dozen realistic competitors.

Furthermore, analysts have been bullish on the stock. Most recently, noted technology analyst firm Craig-Hallum initiated coverage with a buy rating and a price target of $7 per share. At that price target, the analyst sees potential growth in multiples ahead. Moreover, the analyst suggested that the price per share could climb to $19 by 2021, with a user base growing to more than 1.5 million!

Finally, Mogo is not new to this industry. In fact, the company started more than 15 years ago. It is also considered to be one of the pioneers of bringing multiple digital financial products into its mobile app, helping consumers manage and control their financial lives. In fact, for years, the company has offered products through its mobile app that is just starting to see competitors, like Square (SQ) and some private fintechs like Robinhood and SoFi.

Considering that Mogo has more than 800,000 members, it is the largest in the fintech market in Canada. Nonetheless, the company is very small compared to the opportunity for future growth, considering that some of the large banks in Canada have more than 10 million customers.

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7 ways emerging fintech hubs are taking on the giants

Silicon Valley, New York, London and several of China’s largest cities are the world’s leading fintech hubs, but many other locales are gunning for their crown.

The emerging fintech hubs are tiny in comparison to the giants, but they’re rolling out the welcome mat to startups with innovative regulatory policies and incentives.

One reason fintechs might look to base their operations in emerging hubs is the high cost of doing business in tech centers like San Francisco and New York, along with the threat Brexit poses for London’s future. Here are some examples of fresh activity in new fintech zones, and a look at the fintech power the U.K. still controls.

Lithuania is making a major play to become a fintech hub. Regulators created a faster, less expensive path for payment operators to acquire an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license. The Bank of Lithuania supports a bank license for startup financial institutions, which is about five times smaller than standard bank capital requirements.

Last year Lithuania established a sandbox for fintechs to develop and test products under the central bank’s supervision. Now 97 companies are listed on the Bank of Lithuania’s site as having licenses to operate, up from 81 in October 2018.

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Increasing HR efficiency by robotic automation

HR consultants work with numerous organizations that are growing rapidly. For the HR function, this usually means that hiring is their top priority. Hence, HR executives are working everyday tirelessly, reviewing thousands of resumes, corresponding with candidates, scheduling interviews, interviewing, making offers, creating records and finally onboarding them.

In most cases, this means repetitive tasks involving loads of paperwork, time-consuming processes and potentially a lot of inefficiencies. This is where robotics process automation (RPA) kicks in - automating repetitive, rule-based processes and dramatically reducing human involvement in these tasks. Thereby, freeing up time to focus on more value-added tasks to support the organization's growth. RPA in HR has numerous benefits - reducing process costs by as much as 1/10th, ensuring that compliance risks are dramatically cut, and much faster processing times. A software process robot is not limited by 9-to-6 workday, does not need sleep and does not make mistakes. Well, it does not mean that you will have Bumblebee, Chappie or T-1000 replacing your HR manager. But we are surely predicting a software process robot to replace many of your administrative support roles in HR in the next few years.

RPA vs AI: Many clients ask me about the difference between the application of artificial intelligence (AI) vs RPA.

AI is best suited where an organization is keen to replace slightly more complex human decision-making with a machine. Examples include identifying job fit, succession planning, making hiring decisions, etc. Whereas RPA is best suited for repetitive processes where rules are clearly defined, such as hiring, onboarding, payroll, exit management, etc.

Where to start the HR RPA journey: While RPA can be leveraged to create value across the employee hire-to-retire life cycle, this initial step could be to create an automation index of all HR processes and transactions based on the frequency of execution, degree of complexity and value vs cost ratios.

Once all the activities are segregated in order of precedence, it is important to identify the ones that are ruled and fixed procedure-based.

Estimate the cost incurred on rule-based activities and chances are that for a company operating in a developed market, the cost of automating these would be approximately a tenth of the cost of an onshore, full-time employee, or a third of the cost of an offshore employee.

Hiring offers best return on investment: Let's take the example of a recruitment process (from job posting to hiring candidate) and identify the areas where robotics can be applied:

1. creation of job requisition automatically based on arising vacancies (retirement/termination), 
2. updating job requirements (skills required, education qualification, experience, etc) based on available details, 
3. receiving/sending mails to the multiple stakeholders, 
4. uploading job postings to external/internal websites, 
5. sending notifications to vendors/consultants, 
6. filtering profiles of candidates based on job requirements, 
7. interviewing candidates based on adaptive questionnaires, voice-recognition and keyword search in candidate responses, comparison of multiple candidates, 
8. paperwork and communication for hiring candidates after successful background verifications. 

The impact would be across all three aspects of cost, turnaround time and quality, which can lead to a much-improved recruitment process.

Enhancing onboarding experience: Typically, organizations have weekly or biweekly onboarding process for new recruits. The process includes multiple rule-based activities such as form completion, e-verification, opening of bank accounts, background-verification, hardware and software accesses, etc. A study by EY suggests that 52% of organizations do not automate HR processes, leading to potential omissions, errors and inconsistencies. RPA has huge potential to improve a candidate's onboarding experience while also reducing organizational costs.

Organizations must increasingly start viewing RPA as the key element shaping their business and people strategies. While RPA cannot replace human decision-making and non-routine activities with limited past precedent, it provides an unattended, automated solution that works 24/7, without complaints, offers more flexibility and helps eliminate backlogs during demand spikes.

With every automation technology experimentation, the journey along this path will open up new opportunities for scaling up the automation process, finally elevating and transforming the HR back-office support room to a new-age digital business technology center.


About us:

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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Having better customer service by combining Chatbots and RPA Bots

Although enterprise interest in bots seems to be at an all-time high, Gartner reports that 68% of customer service leaders believe bots and virtual assistants will become even more important in the next two years. As bots are called upon to perform a greater range of tasks, chatbots will increasingly rely on back office bots to find information and complete transactions on behalf of customers.

Connecting the Front and Back Office With RPA

Chatbots — and other customer-facing front office bots, such as speech bots and natural language voice response systems (IVRs) — have been the focus of customer experience transformation efforts. These bots interact directly with consumers on websites, phone systems, mobile apps, messaging apps and home assistants. They listen to customer requests, gather details, look up information, perform operations and present results. These capabilities are enabled by conversational AI that includes natural language processing, intent prediction, conversation management and response generation.

Depending on the customer’s intent, a bot may need to access a variety of enterprise systems, such as CRM, order entry, inventory, billing and payment, help desk, service provisioning and others. If these systems have modern APIs, then front office bots can get the information required themselves. However, these bots are powerless if APIs are not available — a common situation due to IT constraints. Fortunately, a solution is at hand: robotic process automation (RPA) is skilled at navigating difficult-to-access enterprise systems.

RPA has been deployed in the back office for a while, helping to automate repetitive tasks in finance, accounting, operations, HR and IT. RPA bots may touch five applications and automate hundreds of clicks that a human would otherwise do manually. The bots can connect to web applications, Windows applications, and primitive client-server applications. They can identify the buttons or links to be clicked on, and the fields on a page where data should be entered or retrieved.

RPA bots can serve human agents as well as virtual agents. These bots specialize in accessing disparate, sometimes legacy, enterprise systems that have user interfaces (e.g., agent consoles, portals and applications) but lack APIs. Using rules engines, the bots gather data across multiple systems, make decisions and execute processes in a repeatable, auditable manner. RPA bots allow agents to spend more time on relationship building and problem-solving activities rather than mundane, routine actions such as looking up and copying information. For example, bots help agents at a large global bank manage complex transactions like retirement rollovers and setting up new accounts. The bot gathers client data, fills out the needed paperwork, and uploads the completed forms to a client portal.

Areas for RPA Improvement

RPA can bridge the gap between front office agents (humans and bots) and complex enterprise systems, making it easier to deliver effortless customer experiences. To realize this potential, RPA vendors should consider the following challenges and opportunities:

1. Faster Turnaround. Most RPA bots work in batch mode, and the turnaround time for an individual item (such as processing a single invoice) can be minutes up to hours, depending on the number of items in the queue and the computing resources available. In customer service, where someone may be on the phone or waiting on live chat, RPA response times will need to be short and predictable. Live customer interactions should be given a higher work scheduling priority than less time sensitive tasks. Furthermore, RPA bots should be over-provisioned (so that some bots are always available to accept a new request).
2. Proactive Service. Most RPA tasks today are reactive and transactional: the bots wait for a customer request to be made, and then fulfill the request. However, the ability to access and combine information across enterprise systems can also be leveraged for proactive service and marketing automation. RPA bots can identify opportunities for personalized offers, such as suggestions for proactive service (e.g., a periodic review of the customer’s financial plan) or recommendations for up-sells and cross-sells (e.g., a loan to consolidate credit card debt). These offers can be presented during a customer conversation, or can be pushed as a notification or reminder.
3. Pricing Flexibility. In RPA, a bot instance is typically priced as a digital worker on an annual contract. The bot instance has the user credentials and computing resources to mimic a single human worker, can work 24 hours a day, but is limited to performing one task at a time. This pricing is well suited for back office functions where processing load can be distributed evenly during the year. In customer service, however, contact volumes can vary greatly by the hour, day, and season. More flexible pricing models will be required to allow digital workers to scale up and down on-demand, allowing companies to maintain response times without paying for underutilized workers.

As we step into a future where man–machine conversations are on the rise, RPA bots will play an important role in improving the quality and productivity of chatbots and human agents. Moving RPA bots from back office batch processing to customer-facing support will empower front line bots and agents to handle more customer intents and free them to focus on what they do best: provide the personalized attention that creates memorable experiences.


About us:

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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Innovative freedom for accountants by RPA

Accountants spend days, weeks even, wrangling thousands of spreadsheets and manually reconciling data - even though new technology now enables the close to be completed more accurately, with less effort, and with significantly reduced risk of error.

One of these noteworthy technologies is robotic process automation (RPA), and it's one of the most impactful innovations to happen to the close since the invention of green-bar paper. RPA automates manual tasks, manages workflow, and standardises the close process across complex organisations and IT landscapes.

RPA applies the combination of intelligent workflows, business rules, triggered operations, and process scheduling to shift repetitive tasks from people to technology. It frees accountants from the drudgery of manual work, and also benefits the business overall by enabling a truly smart close.

Organisations utilising RPA have:

• Automated accounting and finance processes up to 80 per cent 
• Increased accounting productivity by 50 per cent 
• Improved shared service centre efficiency by as much as 75 per cent

Yet many still resist this technology, as evidenced by the pace at which Finance is adopting it: Slowly. Glacially.

Today, many traditional bookkeeping tasks are already being performed by AI. Accounts payable and receivable AI handles much of the work of initiating payments and matching purchase orders. Automated data entry and data categorisation help accountants analyse broad financial trends more quickly.

RPA has reduced audit and contractual processing times from several months to a few weeks. And furthermore, larger firms that are taking advantage of AI are outpacing smaller accounting offices through increased efficiency and higher level services.

With that in mind, the advent of RPA and other advanced automation technologies, rather than ushering in the robot rebellion, should actually enable accountants to finally do what they're meant to be doing: performing analysis, advising the business, and providing impactful financial data to shape their organisations' future. Accountants can focus on all of this while still closing the books faster and more accurately than ever before.

Financial automation software is able to build on an RPA foundation to streamline the financial close with specific conditional workflow and automatic scheduling - automating the repetitive tasks that are a poor use of highly skilled resources, so accountants can focus on value-adding activities.

By combining the latest in RPA and financial close intelligence, the whole process provides powerful efficiency gains and improves trust in the financial close. This enables accounting organisations to drive global standardisation while maintaining a degree of local flexibility.

Leading companies are embracing robots because they know that staying on top today requires working smarter and ensuring access to real-time data.

In today's frenetic, always-on business world, RPA is the key to both. RPA tools reduce risk, increase accuracy and improve visibility, all while freeing accountants from the mind-numbing drudgery of manual close activities. Accountants are then free to focus on what really matters to the health and wealth of the business: forecasting, analysis, and strategy.

About us:

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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The help of RPA when one software doesn’t talk to the other

Chasing digital transformation has taught businesses that automation is critical in this day and age.

It helps reduce human errors, increase efficiencies, lower costs, and create more room for professionals to focus on what matters most — the customer.

However, automation isn’t an easy thing to achieve, and it’s not because organizations don’t have the skills, talent, resources, or capabilities necessary to pursue automation across its different business units.

The reality is that in most cases, a prerequisite for setting up and configuring automation loops is that all software required to perform the task must be integrated in some way. Meaning to say, they must talk to one another.

Traditional software has been developed in silos, either in-house or by different software vendors who are leaders in their own area of specialty. As a result, organizations find that they’re stuck with great applications that don’t talk to one another and hence cannot be automated.

In the long-run, companies might need to migrate to a product suite that’s more robust or wait for vendors to collaborate in order to develop and offer suitable integrations, at least for products lines that don’t compete with one another.

The immediate solution, however, is RPA, short for robotic process automation.

Think of it as a macro that you record on a spreadsheet to perform a series of tasks in the way that you would normally perform them, all done quickly and sequentially.

RPA is the magic tool that bridges the gap between two or more pieces of software that aren’t integrated, have no way of talking to one another, and cannot be linked up in any way.

It’s the perfect tool for organizations with legacy infrastructure to make the leap to new-age products and services for front-end applications without disrupting reliable core business services.

According to a recent note by KPMG, organizations that ignore RPA face a daunting task when it comes to building business automation solutions, often stalling their entire digital transformation as a result.

The think tank evaluated a large insurer’s recent use of RPA to integrate legacy systems and found that consolidating front and back office teams into a single customer service team resulted in 9x acceleration of service processes and a 40 percent reduction in service cost.

The insurer achieved all that without the headaches of building integration points into the legacy systems and managing disparate mainframes and database systems — all because it was willing to give RPA a shot.

To be honest, what one large insurer achieved can be achieved by any organization willing to experiment with RPA. However, it’s probably important to mention that for any business relying on RPA as a way to integrate different pieces of software, governance must be top of mind.

Governance is key to most RPA projects that support digital transformation because the system is designed to carry out a job in the way that it has been taught. It follows the set of tasks as they have been programmed — but that doesn’t take into account two important things — efficiency overhauls and marginal breakdowns.

When an RPA system is being implemented, it might be taught to do something based on a benchmark set by a model employee. This might be good for the short run but doesn’t guarantee that the way that the job is being done is the most efficient.

That’s what governance is for. In the RPA governance function, organizations use data to understand the job that is being performed, lags in the different legs and series of the tasks being performed, and the overall efficiency.

This is where the team can exercise their creativity to find better ways to do the task and get more out of the RPA solution.

The other function that an effective RPA governance tool performs is providing real-time intelligence on RPA solutions that fail to execute and deliver an expected result.

Obviously, this is incredibly important for businesses that built on the results that RPA tools generate by joining disparate systems together — and it seems entirely logical when you think about it.

Despite that, organizations tend to forget about it when actually scaling up their RPA solutions enterprise-wide to support bigger digital transformation projects. Neglecting RPA governance, however, is not an option.

Businesses, irrespective of size, that are looking to get started with workflow automation but struggling to piece together different pieces of software must definitely think about RPA.

However, to get the most out of their RPA bots, organizations must not neglect building in some sort of RPA governance practices before they scale up and build other digital transformation capabilities on top of the output that the solution produces.

About us 

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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Finance 4.0 & Robotic Process Automation

 

Finance professionals aren’t immune to digital disruption. Whether they manage money in an organization or help audit it as a consultancy, technology presents many exciting opportunities to finance executives.

Technology can help really streamline processes, bring in transparency, improve auditing functions, and remove human errors almost entirely.

It can also make it cheaper for organizations to run their finance divisions by automating tasks that were more manual. Does this mean we’ll need fewer finance professionals in the future? Not at all.

The reality is tomorrow’s finance professionals will either be more experienced in the art of optimizing financial automation or proficient in programming languages to audit the accuracy of algorithms ruling the finance division.

Since technology is seen as the force that is driving the 4th industrial revolution, the changes it drives in finance are seen as part of the Finance 4.0 umbrella.

And although Finance 4.0 is great for professionals and businesses, organizations need to prepare themselves before they can make the leap.

In order to evolve to that future state where the finance division is run by technology and overseen by professionals who can help optimize and govern algorithmic processes, they need to prepare themselves and their infrastructure to climb the digital maturity curve.

Getting started with Finance 4.0

The first step to going digital for finance executives is to start automating processes with robotic process automation (RPA).

Given how simple RPA is to train and deploy, finance teams find that their workload lightens easily when they start automating.

RPA-based software robots can check emails for invoices, scan and pick up relevant data from it to add it to the company’s accounting system, and track and follow up on payments.

It can flag items that aren’t aligned with standard operating procedures so the team can look at it. Over time, the action taken by the team is analyzed by the RPA solution to find trends and learn from them.

The fact that RPA is so simple to implement not only helps finance professionals get to grips with technology quickly but it also gives them a good first look at what the future could be for them if they embrace technology entirely.

The intelligent thing about using RPA — and why it’s so important to get started with it in the first place — is that when organizations first start working with the solution, they audit all of their processes.

As a result, inefficiencies get highlighted, roundabout processes get flagged, and there’s a good chance to make the overall system more efficient and robust before even delivering any technology-driven RoI from the project.

The future, after all, is digital — and financial services professionals must pay heed to RPA when exploring future technologies.

Businesses leaders looking to provide support to the organization’s overall digital transformation plan must look at RPA as a first step to the journey, at least in the financial space. 

About us 

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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The Shared Service Sector Transformed By Robotic Process Automation.

 

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is one of the new-age technologies that has successfully taken several industries by storm. Organizations are moving towards RPA because of the benefits that come with its deployment, such as high Return on Investment, and improved overall performance along with cost reduction.

This is especially relevant for the service-related businesses, and this includes Shared Service Centers (SSCs) which protect organizations from economic uncertainty and bring about cost savings. Robotic Process Automation is the boost that Shared Services need to help them bring about a digital transformation.

Do Bots and Shared Services make a good team?

Organizations have always aimed at making Shared Services more cost efficient and the key to achieving this lies in making administrative processes leaner and more efficient. This is where RPA finds space to prove its mettle.

RPA works well with Shared Services because it allows businesses to automate simple, repetitive and mundane tasks. What makes it even more befitting is that these virtual bots which are programmed to mimic human actions take on clerical jobs and complete them in lesser time and at a lower cost. This helps save human working hours which can then be invested in other, more nuanced human tasks.

What does RPA have to offer to SSCs?

SSCs are perfectly capable of digital transformation and RPA is the tool which helps them realize this vision. Here are five ways in which this team works.

Cost reduction: In shifting the burden of mundane tasks on to robots from humans RPA helps reduce the headcount of employees who need to be paid, without affecting the quality and speed of work. This also helps reduce the amount of floor space required for operations, thereby reducing the amount of expenditure on the facility and its maintenance. Training costs and support are no longer a concern since bots are pre-programmed to handle most tasks without assistance.

Improved scalability: RPA increases scalability opportunities for Shared Services and allows them to scale up, whether geographically in terms of increasing the number of customers they cater to, or offering more services. With the help of RPA, SSCs can scale up without having to go through the whole loop of recruiting, training, and managing hordes of new employees. RPA gives organizations the freedom to scale their business without having to employ any extra people.

Increased accuracy and reduced errors: With human intervention at a minimal, the chances of error go down drastically thereby improving overall accuracy within tasks and processes. Also, a virtual workforce is easier to manage, and with reduction in transactional tasks organizations can focus more on the intelligent work that actually makes a difference to clients and the business.

Improved adaptability and security: What this essentially means is that bots can learn, a lot faster than humans and there are lesser chances of them forgetting what they have learnt. As time passes by, certain methods and processes are prone to change due to requirements or technological shifts, and bots are better suited to such changes than humans and their ability to adapt is a lot higher. It allows for better security of data which is collected from a variety of sources and helps improve regulatory compliance.

Better usage of insights and analytics: When it comes to handling of escalations, RPA has the capability to pick up trends and keywords and change the responses accordingly.

RPA allows processing of data stored in various databases and comes up with meaningful insights based on this processing. Important decisions are based on these insights, and analytics help businesses draw out information from raw data.

With all these multi-thronged benefits RPA has to offer, you won’t have much reason to deny your SSC a brush with this new-age technology. 

About us 

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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Reduce cycle time to deliver client services for AT&T by adopting RPA

Robotics would instantly conjure up an image of mechanical humanoids prancing alongside human beings, doing tasks beyond human capabilities. The truth of robots in an enterprise setting is, however, somewhat different.

Software robots or robotic process automation (RPA) helps automate several rule-based tasks and business processes that frees up precious capital, time, and manpower for more critical functions in network management.

Implementing software robots still relies on significant upfront human effort to identify processes, create business roles, and test software. The upside, however, is compelling. At AT&T, software robots have taken over several routine and customer-facing tasks such as locating and tracking a complaint ticket, or for generating invoices. We have over 1,000 such software robots deployed throughout the organization.

The experiment began in last five years when we started exploring how humans and robots can work together. In 2016, we launched an online training program to teach employees how to build bots.

We then started experimenting with artificial intelligence, integrating it with software robots, to make them even more efficient and useful. The bots that scan phone calls to AT&T’s customer service division and compiles network traffic reports, has been particularly useful over the past few years.

Tending to the basics
We have been on a transformational journey for last 5-10 years. The first step was a strict application rationalisation program that dropped the number of applications we work with by 60%. While we were doing that, we also put in place a digital transformation strategy that was holistic, starting from front end and then going deeper into the technology infrastructure layer.

Skilling and re-skilling are important spokes of the wheel for AT&T here. Skills transformation and culture are after all critical to any digital transformation journey. We invest about $250 million annually in re-skilling. Last year 1.8 million hours of training was taken up by our workforce in areas spanning from big data, to agile networks, software delivery lifecycles, API platforms, and so on.

This was also an opportunity to liberate the knowledge-base of our people in front-end and taking everyone along the transformational journey. We trained our resources in the front-end team to build bots independently on the bot’s platform. The results were instant. We could immediately cut the cycle time of developing solutions, with results visible in days, or even in real-time.

It’s a tiered approach we follow in re-skilling and reusing the talent base. If a resource has done very good bots, we train them to automate business processes using bots. If they do well there, we train them to be process engineers, who then go on to redesign the base processes itself. We have also been thoughtful about how far we take the application of bots. Once a bot is mature enough, we think of how to integrate it into the base system and free up resources to build other bots for other functions.

Borderless innovation
One of the other key tenets of our transformation journey is our focus on open source. Because historically, we were getting black boxed by network equipment. We didn’t know what was going wrong or what was happening inside. We wanted to turn it into a white-box strategy to liberate the network functions trapped in the black box. So, we moved from a hardware-defined world of network management to a more software-centric world. We put our most impressive IPs in open source to align our global software intellect.

The skills transformation internally and engagement with the open source was a big pivot for us. Apart from re-skilling, we also changed our processes and policies to open this avenue of co-creation.

The focussed approach in re-skilling employees has helped us create an aggressive platform-based roadmap. With the right talent around, we felt it was time to put in place an open source API platform on top of the existing systems to consolidate functions. API platform allowed us to be more rational about the number of interfaces we have, dramatically reducing it, increasing re-use, and improving cycle time for delivery of services to our clients. Our API platform today does over 390 billion transactions a year.

Adopting a platform approach dramatically reduces the cycle time for simple tasks, that would otherwise require its own interface, localised tech skillsets, more human power, and it will still not be free of human errors. In case of a network overhaul, the disruption will be negligent, since the hardware is using the same customisable software layer.

The next bet
Our next threshold was middleware. Our API, data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning platforms are the middleware that help us transform legacy systems in telecom networks. It allows for a federated development, in the sense that the platform itself offers you tool kits to quickly build solutions independently. It allows us to optimise human resources, train them easily, and they don’t even need to be expert developers, yet still create software.

Applying the AI and ML layers to software bots has helps us make our solutions more effective in achieving highly complex results that are multidimensional and still deliver an agile framework in a way which is cost-effective. Our outage team, for instance, receives real-time information, manages and dispatches tickets, and provides call information for customers.

A common pitfall of bots and enterprises is that it often becomes an IT project rather than a business project. At AT&T, we prefer leveraging our existing workforce as knowledge to implement software bots with a vision to eventually use to overhaul end-end processes, from front-end to the back-end.


About us 

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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Increase human interaction by RPA

According to a new study, organizations are increasingly concerned with the employee experience as they grapple with the forces of robotic process automation (RPA). Further, operating model issues and psychological barriers hold back RPA efforts.

The study, involved 100 decision makers from operations groups, shared services, finance and accounting, HR and other core business lines.

Two-thirds (66%) of respondents said that RPA restructures existing work, enabling employees to have more human interactions, and 60% said RPA helps employees focus on more meaningful, strategic tasks. In addition, 57% of respondents reported that RPA reduces manual errors.

However, firms are struggling to scale their RPA solutions due to the lack of trained personnel and resources to support and use RPA technology.

In fact, a vast majority (93%) of respondents said they struggle to understand the different deployment options available to them. Additionally, leaders must overcome the psychological impact of RPA on their workforce.

Communication and collaboration between the business and workers, and well-designed change management programs are crucial.

That said, RPA leads to increasingly engaged employees. The benefits of RPA reported by firms include increased efficiency, deeper insights into customers, improved customer service, and improved employee engagement.

In addition, with highly repetitive and rule-based tasks being automated, RPA enables firms to create digital workforces that execute repeatable process steps faster, accurately and more cost-effectively than traditional human workers. 

Most (92%) of respondents expected faster efficiency and 86% said they are seeing exactly that. Keeping employees engaged and happy must go hand-in-hand with deploying RPA to improve customer outcomes; firms must be employee-centric as well as customer-centric in their approach to truly capitalize on the advantages offered by RPA. 

About us 

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

Read More