Digital Lean Operations: Smart Automation and Artificial Intelligence in Financial Services

The financial services industry covers banks, insurance companies and investment managers, as well as transaction or message processing companies. To streamline billions of daily transactions, lean principles and operational excellence programs have found theirway to financial service firms. Today, the resulting cost and risk reductions are further enhanced by embracing newdigital technologies—such as those falling under the umbrella of Industry 4.0. These digital technologies stimulate a new wave of operational efficiency improvements by making processes more automated, autonomous, and smart. Inspired by Boute and Van Mieghem (2021), we provide a framework to evaluate the transition towards digital, autonomous and smart operations in financial services. We report our findings from the digital operations journey of Euroclear, a service provider of settlements for securities transactions, on their quest for increased automation and autonomy. We also shed light on the potential of artificial intelligence in financial services. Data-driven solutions may support financial service firms from purely descriptive models and methods with strong predictive power, towards prescriptive decision-making algorithms.