Speakers:

• Matthew Oakeley, Chief Technology Officer, Investec Asset Management
• Geoff Galbraith, Chief Operating Officer, MAN Group
• Michael Marks, Chief Operating Officer, Legal & General Investment Management

Fund Operator: Legacy systems have seemed to have intractable problems for so long that people always look for the mythical solution.

How do we start to break down these manual processes, so they can be automated to prevent those dangerous elements from being overlooked and not captured within an implementation project?

Matthew: RPA is interesting because it offers an approach to automation that is different to how we usually do things.

Traditional IT automation generally involves reengineering. An army of business analysts come in and conduct interviews to try and work out what you do.

No business analyst will ever, for their own pride, intend to create a new process that is ‘a bit rubbish but workable’. They will want to gold plate it and design the ‘perfect’ solution.

Unfortunately, halfway through the project things get de-scoped and you will decide to focus only on the ‘tier 1’ requirements.

By the end of it you have something where everyone is frustrated and annoyed and the business analyst has moved onto something else and never finishes it. This is why IT automation gets a bad name!

"Why not get a robot to follow the bizarrely arcane process instead of getting the person to do it?"

Where RPA is interesting, is that it asks, “What if the process remained garbage?”. Why not get a robot to follow the bizarrely arcane process instead of getting the person to do it? Don’t re-engineer it, just take the human out of it.

This is quite interesting as a short-term sticking plaster, but it is certainly not the dream where computers are infallible, and everything is run efficiently and perfectly. It is hardly the ‘Rise of the Robots’ – but it might have its uses.

The bottom line remains, however, that before you start with RPA you must ask whether the cost of automating the thing is worth it if you haven’t bothered to automate it before. RPA is not free.

Michael: I vehemently agree with where Matthew is coming from, in that RPA is not a long-term solution but do we actually know what we want the long-term solution to be? We do know that we have to do more with less.

If I look at our organisation, our headcount has stayed broadly flat for several years and our ability to deliver more complex solutions to the market means that we have to do this efficiently. We have some less than perfect processes, but we can make them more efficient and still deliver what we want to whilst we consider how we really want this to be five years from now.

I believe there is a real value but there is a balance about how much resource you throw at it.

"RPA is not a long-term solution but do we actually know what we want the long-term solution to be?"

We must be careful that we don’t end up with the same problems where we talk about spreadsheets and end user computing solutions; where we don’t know the controls that are in place in those spreadsheets, or where the data comes from and if someone can change this cell.

So, we must have all the right governance. By putting the sorts of tools and the coding of a robot into the hands of people who understand the processes you can end up with more robust ways to affect some less than perfect processes.

Geoff: In applying some of these technologies, it has allowed us to change the skillsets of the people that we are hiring into operations.

As we deliver some of these efficiencies, we are hiring solutions analysts and people with lots of experience in this area, who have an engineering type background or who want to engineer, who might have the right answer for some of these problems in three to five years’ time.

This excerpt is taken from a roundtable: “The take-over of machines and computers in the running of operations and the new role of humans as supervisors”.

You can read the full article in the research report Fund Technology, Data and Operations, Europe 2019 here.

 

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