Productivity increase by 80%! Cyclone RPA Helps Dongxing Securities Build Intelligent Financial Center

dunging Securities Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Dongping Securities") is a nation-wide full-fledged securities company established under the approval of China’s Ministry of Finance and China Securities Regulatory Commission, with China Orient Asset Management Co., Ltd. as its main sponsor. The company started its IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Feb 26, 2015, becoming the first security company listed in the stock market under the asset management category. Established in 2008, Dongxiang Securities has set up over 86 branch offices and securities business halls all over China by the end of 2019.

Today, its global intelligent financial service center is working to be a driver of corporate-level digital transformation by rapidly putting digital technologies into practice. At Dongxing Securities, the financial center is expected to improve the cost efficiency, and enhance business value. In the face of the expanding business volume, and increasing number of business types, and the accelerated core business transformation, it requires higher financial operation efficiency and quality, as well as more effective financial data analysis.

In this context, Dongxing Securities has partnered with Cyclone to build an enterprise-wide intelligent financial center. In this project, Cyclone's innovative RPA solution, combined with intelligent technologies like NLP, AI, Big Data Analytics, etc., and its financial brain and control center helps Dongxing Securities Financial Center automate its financial processes from bill submission, business document review, invoice verification to centralized payment. It also enables the Financial Center to drive standardization and service delivery efficiency, transform the organizational structure, and enhance risk management, which lays solid foundation for the intelligent financial operations.

Business pain points

The financial staff in Dongxing Securities usually have to search and download a massive amount of data, manually check them and input them into the system, then export and report them to their managers in their daily work. Sometimes, they also have to add more data in the system. They have to log into multiple platforms, and walk through complex and lengthy processes with lower automation efficiency and higher risk of manual work. The business processes may be stuck or delayed when unusual or negligent behaviors occurs. In this case, the business efficiency may be significantly compromised, and the labor force is wasted.

Take the following two financial pain points as examples:

Inconsistent fields for inbound data submission from the Financial 

Department: The financial staff have to submit abundant data sets internally in their daily work to generate financial vouchers. However, fields used in financial documents are inconsistent with their counterparts in the business systems, which may be handled with less efficiency, and higher error rates.

Most business systems have no direct links to financial systems: Dozens of systems, such as financial management system, OA, online reporting system, and Business Tax to VAT Invoicing system, work independently, which involve tens of business processes and hundreds of business scenarios. Business personnel have to input and search for the data in multiple systems. The work is complex and the efficiency is low.

In the Phase I of Dongxing Securities Project, Cyclone worked with Dongxing Securities to build Cyclone RPA intelligent automation platform, which automated many business processes in the Financial Department, thus eliminating key pain points in the daily business routines of the department. By now, we have conducted research over 20 business processes to understand their requirements in the Phase II of the project.

Cyclone RPA "Smart Assistant" Phase I Launched

By developing the business processes for Dongxing Securities based on its real working environment such as its financial system, office software, SMS platform, etc. in an optimal way, Cyclone transforms the massive amount of manual work under disparate systems to automated workflow, thus boosting business efficiency. Dongxing Securities called this solution "Smart Assistant".

Take two typical financial scenarios of fund transfer and payroll accounting as examples:

Cyclone RPA Robot can automatically open the financial form and the inbound claim form, and fill the project data from the financial form into the inbound claim form field by field. However, the fields used in the inbound claim forms from the reporting departments are not the same as those in financial forms, whether it be fund transfer form or payroll accounting form. Handling these business processes manually is less efficient, and may be subject to data population errors Cyclone RPA intelligent automation platform powered by advanced technologies like OCR, NLP, etc., can leverage AI capabilities of Machine Learning and Symbolic Linguistics (Knowledge Engineering), to extract key information from documents with high precision, and compare, review and track contents, so as to accurately understand the documents and automatically complete forms under different field definitions. 

After completing the form, Cyclone RPA Robot automatically logs into the appropriate financial system, imports the data, and clicks Submit and Approve in succession. With these documents, we can generate nodes. Then select the date and choose the data to create vouchers. Data shows that it increases the efficiency of handling the fund transfer and payroll accounting by 85% and 93% respectively.

Yang Xiaobin, Information Technology Department of Dongxing Securities, said, "The wider use of RPA in the company has greatly improved business efficiency, and promised the accurate information transmission. It has also freed our staff from tedious and low-value tasks, so that they can focus on more valuable work. “

Cyclone RPA Enhances Strengths

The Cyclone RPA "Smart Assistant" solution has transformed the repeated and tedious manual work in Financial and HR departments of Dongxing Securities into automated workflow, which shortens the project implementation to 4 weeks only, and reduces the business handling time by 90% on average, equivalent to the workload of 2 Full-Time Employees (FTE). According to statistics, the business efficiency increases by 80% after RPA goes live.

As Yang Xiaobin said, "Our partnership with Cyclone has optimized the roles and responsibilities of our financial staff in the headquarter, and reshaped our business operation mode, so that we can run our daily routines at the Financial Department in a more efficient and standard way. Technology drives our growth. “

At present, our project Phase II for the Financial Department involves more than 20 business processes, including transaction records import and the daily accounting of interest rate swaps. By now, we have completed the requirement research on them. In the future, Cyclone RPA will incorporate more business scenarios of more departments of Dongxing Securities including compliance, risk control, wealth, HR and IT, among others, to build more intelligent business processes, for real-time mining and analysis of a wider array of data, achieving a stronger data connectivity and more efficient business operations,