The General Data Protection Regulation, which went into effect May 25th, gives consumers more control over how companies use their personal data. Nordea, one of the largest Nordic banks, is dealing with the time-consuming task of request processing by employing Robotics Process Automation (RPA), a new technology that utilises “intelligent automation”.
Nordea estimates that manually completing a single GDPR request would take between one and three hours. This is a particularly costly proposition in terms human capital. Hampus Gerlach, head of the company’s robotics centre of excellence puts the matter thusly:
“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.”
The robotics centre for excellence came up with the solution to use RPA. What makes GDPR amenable to RPA is that it is rooted in clearly-defined rule sets and steps. Nordea figured out the process descriptions and IT applications, then configured the robots for taking care of processes for GDPR, all in a handful of weeks.
Gerlach says that a traditional IT automation approach would have cost too much time to get up and running and been a financial burden for the company.
Recently, IBM announced that its cognitive computer platform Watson, is able to help companies meet regulatory requirements regarding anti-money laundering and know-your-customer. Particularly, the company’s Financial Crimes Insight with Watson solution uses intelligent robotic process automation and other advanced analytics tools to assist banks in pinpointing financial crime.
By Elliot Lyons, Research Analyst
