Each month, back-office bank employees set about to do the tedious task of reconciling mortgage payments that come in with a Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac servicing profile. Certain identifying numbers are sometimes left off, and it’s up to these workers to manually make sure each payment corresponds to the correct account.
But at the $12.4 billion-asset Busey Bank in Champaign, Illinois, that “numbing” task, as President and CEO Robin Elliott calls it, is handled by a robot.
While it’s unusual for a bank Busey’s size to outsource such tasks to a machine, Elliott said the investment was necessary not to eliminate workers, but to eliminate the kinds of menial assignments that can crush morale.
“We’re not looking to get rid of people,” Elliott said. The goal is to free them up "to do more meaningful tasks,” which, in turn, is expected to make their jobs more pleasant.
To be sure, it’s not an actual robot doing the work. Busey, a unit of First Busey Corp., has invested in robotic process automation. RPA is computer software that can emulate human actions.
“A robot to me meant like R2D2, but really it’s a code that gives it a human element,” Elliott explained.
Addressing the drudgery of back-office functions is just one way Busey, one of American Banker’s
The bank has implemented a workflow system that can help arrange meetings and track the completion of projects, cutting down on time-consuming updates via email or phone conversations.
It has also updated much of its back-office code and migrated it to a cloud-based system, moves that have allowed more of its engineers and back-office employees to work remotely.
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Elliott said that all of these initiatives are improving job satisfaction of existing employees and, importantly, helping to give the bank a leg up in recruiting. “The war for talent is alive and well,” Elliott said. “Allowing them to be remote is important.”
The bank has also reshaped its staffing models to give employees the opportunity to try new things, which helps stave off burnout.
In one example of this, the commercial banking and wealth management teams were recently merged, giving employees the chance to try their hands in new business lines.
If a small-business owner wants help selling his company and planning for retirement, for instance, the same team at Busey that in the past set the owner up with a commercial loan can help with the new request. Elliott said that, previously, lenders would have to “climb over the wall” to ask for help from the private bank.
“We’ve moved to a concept of coupling our wealth management to the commercial bank … more tightly than just about anyone else has,” Elliott said. “For our size we’re pulling a decent amount of weight.”
