With the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) threatening to swamp workers, Nordea turned to Robotics Process Automation (RPA), slashing the time needed to process customer requests.
GDPR has seen customers exercising their new rights to access personal data, leaving banks with a significant burden. Nordea estimates that every GDPR request could take between one and three hours to complete manually and so turned to its robotics centre of excellence for help.
In a blog, the centre's senior execution lead, Hampus Gerlach, says that traditional IT automation would have been too costly and taken too much time.
But because GDPR is based on a clear set of rules and steps, it is ideal for RPA, an emerging technology that enables so-called intelligent automation. In a matter of weeks, process descriptions were created and relevant IT applications were mapped before robots were configured to handle GDPR processes.
"While every GDPR request could have taken us one to three hours to process manually, our virtual colleagues will now instead handle a significant part of the work for us, cutting down the human time we will spend on a request to just a matter of minutes," says Gerlach.