Singaporean bank UOB has welcomed two new virtual employees, Amy and Eve, to the company.
Amy and Eve are the bank’s first robots and have been assigned to teams supporting its wholesale banking and retail businesses. Early reports from their human teammates have been positive, with most noting how helpful and productive the pair have been.
The new recruits, who are not physical robots, but software programmes, have thrived on tasks that their colleagues found repetitive and time-consuming. Since their introduction three weeks ago, they have cut the time taken to process a transaction by more than half the bank said in a press release.
The New Virtual Workforce is Here
Amy is attached to the trade finance operations function, helping to process requests for Letters of Credit by the Bank’s corporate customers. The bot extracts a wide range of data and then enters it into the finance of international trade automated system for approval by another colleague. What used to take up to 240 seconds, 12 screens and multiple cross-checking for accuracy now takes only 40 seconds to complete.
Lim Ann Liat, managing director and head of Markets and Enterprise Technology, Group Technology and Operations, UOB, said that Amy and Eve are the dawn of a new virtual workforce in UOB and are proving themselves to be valued additions to the team. The bank plans to take onboard more robots in the coming months to manage other processes relating to card operations, cash management and trade and remittance.
