During the first day of PostTrade 360 Helsinki, Mia Talvasto outlined how Mandatum Life has tried its hands at automating processes – and got a taste for more.
Receivers of the smallest monthly pensions payments were asked if they would rather prefer a yearly lump sum. A thousand said yes. By traditional methods, handling their applications and recalculating their payments would take 20 minutes per person and could not have been done in the two weeks available before payments were starting – but with newly implemented robotic process automation they could.
In her presentation on Wednesday afternoon, Mia Talvasto, development manager with Sampo Group’s Finnish insurance arm Mandatum Life, took all the big talk about process robotics down to the office floor.
“Automation does not have to be expensive.”
Get your stuff in order – first
“By all means, don’t automate processes that are not efficient,” she urged, suggesting that automation work could rather be performed jointly with process improvement from a lean perspective.
She also emphasised the need to plan for maintenance.
”It is not a problem when you have two or three processes, but with more processes you get more problems,” she said, pointing to the resource challenge.
”The same people who do the automation are the same people who are best at doing other things.”
See also our recent interview about automation and illiquid assets with Sampo Group’s head of back office, Sirpa Yrjönmäki.
PostTrade 360 Helsinki is taking place on 30–31 October, at Pörssitalo. The agenda can be found here, and our editorial coverage will be gathered here.