The Proven Benefits of Digitalization in the Banking Sector

Dr. Marianna Sándor, CEO, K&H Shared Services

Our story started a bit more than 15 years ago when we decided to design and implement our shared service and sourcing strategy, including setting up a shared service center for entities in the K&H Group. The aim was to improve efficiency and be cost-effective by centralizing general and administrative policies, processes, and tasks, such as processing incoming and outgoing invoices, administering payroll, and managing taxation. Parallel with the centralization, we simplified our IT Platform/ERP system to reach upfront value capture. We combined the transformation to establish a VAT (Value Added Tax) group structure, which made our business flow more straightforward.

Since then, we are working continuously on process improvements, simplification, and lean programs as other financial shared service providers. A few years ago, we realized we have already tapped the potential to traditional levers. In the meantime, technology changed around us; the whole ecosystem was renewed. We had to face new challenges brought by blockchain, artificial intelligence, chatbots, robotic process automation (RPA), machine-to-machine learning, OCR (optical character recognition). Our core business started to use the technologies mentioned earlier. More and more of our core services became digital by preferring seamless, real-time interactions supported in many cases with smartphone applications. Because of this trend, we realized that the general administrative function without automating—still collecting papers, doing manual work— became outdated and doesn’t support our workflow anymore.

"We need to develop our ERP system accordingly to accept such an XML structure. Still, this way, we can eliminate errors and improve data quality regarding this kind of invoice"

Non-core finance functions - such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll administration, taxation, procurement, and facility management - represent a significant part of every organization. The most innovative companies invest in developing these functions and turning them into digital solutions and automation to improve performance and reduce costs. In our case, covid-19 helped us to accelerate remote working and the need to speed up our efforts to digitalize to improve efficiency and being cost-effective at the same time. We learned that modernizing the finance functions is essential for a successful digital transformation journey to evolve towards a more integrated, consultative model that supports value-based decision making.

In 2019, we deployed our first RPA, responsible for pre-check outgoing payment with the scanned invoices and ERP system transfer data (amount, account number, currency, etc.) with necessary OCR technology. This pilot was successful; the automated process eliminated human errors, reduced processing time, and even more costs.

In 2020, we decided to continue automation of the VAT return data collection process for our entire VAT group, which will replace long hour’s manual work and free up human resources for more valuable activities such as tax consulting. As an unexpected positive side effect, our employee satisfaction increased due to the changes, as we dropped the outdated, manual, and often cumbersome processes. Our colleagues now have an opportunity to work on more creative tasks and adding extra value to our clients.

Based on our experience, investments in RPA pay off. However, this is not the only and ultimate automation tool we can use to improve our efficiency. While our focus is threefold: automation to eliminate manual work and release capacity, cost-effectiveness, and innovation to build new service lines and capabilities, we have to combine different tools with RPA, like OCR (optical character recognition), flexible workflows, artificial intelligence, cloud solution, and self-service portal. During the pandemic, our stakeholders (clients and employees too) were encouraged to use digital and self-service tools as much as they could.

During your simplification and digitalization journey, do not forget about authorities, because they are in the middle of the transformation process like a business and private sectors, and companies can capture value through build-in and use authority-digitized solutions, too. In Hungary, all invoices issued by a Hungarian taxpayer to another regarding domestic supply transaction should be reported real-time to the tax authority regardless of the charged VAT amount. Every taxpayer should provide this data in the same structure in XML files, and the tax authority enables taxpayers to get back reported XML/invoicing data from the relevant domestic suppliers. That means for us that we can get back data from tax authorities to our corporate ERP system for pre-registering the main details of our incoming domestic invoices. Of course, we need to develop our ERP system accordingly to accept such an XML structure. Still, this way, we can eliminate errors and improve data quality regarding this kind of invoice.

This example shows how important it is to thinking out-of-the-box even when it comes to simple process automation, such as accounts payable or accounts receivables.