Intelligent automation in financial services: Leading the way

The financial services sector has been an eager adopter of robotic process automation (RPA): by one estimate, it accounts for 29% of the RPA market, more than any other sector. So it stands to reason that the industry is an early adopter of intelligent automation, the combination of RPA with AI. "Financial services [institutions] have always been among of the top adopters of intelligent automation," says Sarah Burnett, industry analyst and evangelist at process mining vendor KYP.ai. Financial institutions have adopted a range of use cases for intelligent automation, from simple integrations of cognitive services into RPA systems to, in a few cases, AI-powered decision making. As such, they have also encountered the security risks and governance challenges that arise from intelligent automation sooner than most. Intelligent automation is a broad term, representing a range of possibilities for integrating AI and machine learning into process automation.