What Will Be the Future of Back Office?

How can new technologies help modernise back office?

I believe back office is already moving from an input factory to a smaller team focused on introducing automation and change, managing a very low level of exceptions and maintaining constant monitoring.

What are the practical opportunities for AI, cognitive computing and machine learning in creating efficiencies and optimising back office processes and functions?

All the listed technological advances are means to reduce the every-day, repetitive functions in back office so that the highly skilled specialists can focus on implementing these solutions into more and more functions.

How to be a lean, agile and collaborative bank?

In a continuous manner. There is no stopping. As soon as operations steps on the road of being an enabler of change, collaboration with other units becomes inevitable and the norm. As soon as the organisation as such understands that old processes cannot and must not be replicated to new systems and solutions, and new processes cannot be designed alone, efficient process management methods become focal.

What can we expect from operations in banking in the near future?

As stated above, I believe the back office of the future will be smaller in scale (though not in cost) as it becomes the enabler and sometimes the driver for those technological changes that make the daily operations of a bank almost fully automated. Designing, implementing and monitoring said developments, ensuring that they fit into the already working solution set will require highly skilled, process-thinking and collaborative people.

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Reka SCHREIBER is a Head of Operations at Erste Bank Hungary. Having spent 20+ years in banking, most of it in operations/customer experience and process management, she has personally experienced the changes back office has been going through. However, according to her, they are not at the end of that particular road.