How a Thai Bank Offered Swift Financial Assistance to Customers Using Digital Workers

In Thailand, Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) is a household name. As the country’s oldest financial institution, SCB has been operating for 110 years. But even that extensive experience was challenged when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The Thai government put policies in place to mitigate financial stress, but it was left to banks to implement them. 

Challenge

As the Thai government was realizing the full extent of the damage being caused to its financial markets, it acted as most did and quickly introduced policies designed to help alleviate financial stress. To assist customers in accessing that relief, SCB added the option to apply for assistance through its mobile banking app.

But almost immediately after doing so, the bank found it was overwhelmed with applications. Processing these applications quickly was critical to ensuring prompt repayments. As a stop-gap measure, staff was working seven days a week to clear the backlog. But with tens of thousands of applications to process, this wasn’t sustainable. SCB needed another, smarter option.

Solution

Looking to address the growing backlog as quickly as possible, SCB turned to intelligent automation. Working at pace and recruiting additional Blue Prism digital workers into its workforce, SCB designed an optimization and deployment process to book customer applications into the system. By the end of week one, digital worker optimization was completed and additional digital workers had been deployed. By the end of week four, SCB had processed over 100,000 applications and had taken significant pressure off of its employees. But most of all, SCB responded in an efficient and timely way, giving customers peace of mind when they needed it most.