By Sarah Snell Cooke, Principal, Cooke Consulting Solutions

According to the Center for Financial Services Innovation, 91 million people living in the U.S. have no credit score/are not able to be scored or have FICO scores of less than 600.

We often hear the rote, “It’s too expensive to serve underserved markets.” But what if we look at automating some of the backend work—and even some of the consumer-facing processes—as an investment in the fields of membership you work so hard to serve and improve?

Underserved consumers spent more than $173 billion on fees in 2016, a CFSI study found, including $39.4 billion on fees and interest for single payment loan products, such as overdrafts and payday loans. Additionally, short-term credit, including credit card usage, is growing rapidly ($57.9 billion spent in 2016) among the underserved. Long-term credit growth among the underserved was bolstered by marketplace lending and resurgence of buy here, pay here auto purchases to the tune of $51.7 billion in fees. At the same time, payment and deposit accounts are retracting, down to $17.3 billion in fees.

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CFSI cites Consumer Financial Protection Bureau research that only 8.3% of checking accounts overdraft more than 10 times annually, but this tiny percentage represents approximately 75% of annual overdraft revenue.

If we consider automation as an investment in efficiencies in back-office processes (everything from lending to compliance!) and serving all credit union members and potential members, it frees up time and resources, allowing credit unions to help save these consumers—and really all of them—with more one-on-one help and that service credit unions are always bragging about.

I’m not going to pretend to be a techie, so I won’t dig into the various types of automation systems, but I will discuss the benefits of automation that allow credit unions to more effectively and efficiently serve out their mission: not for profit, not for charity, but for service. Financial institutions’ processes are riddled with repetitive and time-consuming procedures. At the same time, consumers want to reduce their costs, receive improved products and services with enhanced delivery.

Automation allows advisers and judgment-based employees more time to work with members by “removing the mundane and allowing them to spend their time on the parts of the business process that are customer centric and not rule driven,” Accenture suggests in its research on robot process automation. Modern businesses will be able to enmesh the human and machine handoff seamlessly for the consumer for better service and provide more time for expanded service.

Not everyone is taken by the better service argument, so consider the other benefits. Human error is mitigated with automation. It creates an audit trail, assisting with compliance and business risk. Accenture reports that robotic process automation can create a 40% decrease in human handling of information and cycle time. It allows a business to be up and running even when employees aren’t, whether it’s 2 a.m. or there’s a natural disaster taking place. Processing costs have been reduced by up to 80% with RPA. Greater quality control is possible and it’s scalable across account opening, reconciliation, report generation, mortgage approvals, delinquency notification, processing of credit card orders, audit support, fraud detection, and more.

Besides, your competitors are doing it. In fact, PWC is expecting a key upgrade to intelligent process automation among financial services providers in 2018. Of financial institutions, 33% are planning or executing a live product, have IPA bots in production or are scaling existing IPA, while 48% are in the education process or experimenting. A PWC survey found that half of the financial services industry reports making substantial investments in artificial intelligence and 66% say they expect to within three years. Fully 72% of these business decision makers believe AI is the future.

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Consumers who solely use digital banking increased from 27% in 2012 to 46% in 2017, while those who only conducted their financial services business through human interaction decreased from 15% to 10%. Make those interactions count rather than distracting employees who are trying to serve their members with mundane work that can be automated. Imagine: instead of eliminating 2 million jobs in the next decade through automation, as banks wish to do and Financial Times reported, not-for-profit credit unions freed up employees to do the work of the credit union community’s mission.