As a prominent real estate firm specializing in property development, property investment and property management, CIFI Group boasts expansive geographical coverage in China ranging from first-tier cities to cities with high growth potential. CIFI Group’s developmental projects cover properties of various types including residential, office, and integrated commercial complexes.
With the rapid development of CIFI group Centre of Excellence (CoE) came a rapid increase in the volume of transactional data — which the staff were burdened with manually downloading, processing, and verifying as part of the usual reconciliation process. Doing this manually would exhaust a great deal of employees’ valuable work hours which would be used to:
1. Individually log into each of the 14 banking online systems
2. Download the financial data from each bank’s online system
3. Download the financial data from CIFI group’s own system
4. Individually compare the financial data from all relevant systems for discrepancies
5. Write a report to be sent to the relevant parties
Feeling the process to be painstakingly time and resource intensive, CIFI Group hoped to leverage intelligent automation to minimize the need for human resources in performing this routine yet critical task. Given the large number of data sources involved and the repetitive, rule-based nature, RPA was identified to be the ideal solution and Laiye RPA was selected as the preferred automation product.
RPA and Finance: The Security Concern
Robotic Process Automation in these particular types of scenarios is not easy. There is often one obstacle firms encounter on a regular basis when seeking to deploy RPA in this field: security tokens. Many banks and financial institutions that CIFI Group cooperated with required the use of USB Security Keys in order to access their online systems. This is a physical flash drive which would need to be connected to the machine through which the user hopes to access the online banking system.
How could an RPA bot identify and use the correct physical USB key corresponding to the relevant bank to enter the online system?
To address this roadblock, Laiye introduced a network hub, a physical device which could store multiple USB keys for automation purposes. The network hub incorporates hardware and software to transmit USB data to the operating virtual machine and the PC via TCP/IP network.
This alone, however, was insufficient.
Laiye went further and developed a device named KeyBox which, besides having the ability to store up to 30 passwords, assists in the input of passwords during the RPA operation.
With the authentication barriers tackled through the combination of network hub and KeyBox, Laiye RPA was successfully implemented to simplify the process. After RPA deployment, the process would be fully automated as the RPA bot would:
1. Automatically log in and download the necessary transactional data from all 14 banking systems.
2. Automatically download the data from CIFI Group’s own system
3. Automatically conduct cross-comparison while flagging any discrepancies
4. Automatically generate a report to be sent to the relevant parties
Automation of the above steps enabled employees to direct their efforts on tasks requiring human thought. Consequently, there was reduction in labour hours, labour costs, and a boost in employee productivity.
About Laiye
Laiye has rich experience in RPA + AI and helps businesses and people realize their full potential by optimizing the human-machine collaborative alliance with sophisticated, dynamic, productivity-enhancing digital, low-code “workforce solutions”. Laiye delivers the deepest, most advanced AI/RPA/NLP solutions to help businesses become more efficient, effective, agile, and successful. And it frees people to focus on meaningful, innovative, mission-critical initiatives.
Core technologies include robotic process automation (RPA), process mining, natural language processing (NLP), conversational intelligence, text recognition, and image recognition.
