How to transform work and harness the full potential of your junior talent?

Boring, repetitive work makes it even harder to recruit and retain good people, particularly in financial and professional services. A poll by KPMG found that two-thirds of 1,500 people interviewed said they would not consider working in the financial services sector as the work is, in their eyes, too boring.

Paperwork is the root cause of the perception problem, especially in highly regulated sectors like legal. As per the latest EY/Harvard Law survey, an overwhelming 87% of General Counsels confirm they spend too much time on low-value, routine tasks, and 47% state that the increasing volume of low-value work has impacted employee morale.

Many organizations have automated aspects of document processing in attempts to reduce the admin overload and free up colleagues to spend more time on more compelling, value-adding work. Such an approach can also drive down operating costs and release new funds to attract and retain the very best talent. A new white paper, A New Ally in the Race for Talent, argues they have only scratched the surface, and a whole new level of benefits can be uncovered.

In the age of “the great resignation,” the paper – authored by industry analyst firm PAC –finds that a quarter of organizations in financial services wrestle with staff attrition levels that exceed 20%. At the same time, almost two-thirds see a lack of resources and capacity as a critical barrier to innovation.

This is not a problem restricted to unqualified admin roles. Many young lawyers must read and analyze hundreds or thousands of documents, searching for relevant clauses or cross-referencing facts. Back-office tasks also eat up time, such as transposing information between documents.

The rising tide of challenges that legal teams must address — Brexit, anti-money laundering, IR35, GDPR, MiFID and new demands around environmental, sustainability and governance (ESG) reporting —are all taking their toll. The Association of Corporate Counsel recently claimed that 74% of in-house lawyers are consequently experiencing moderate to very high levels of burnout.

According to the white paper, companies in Western Europe will spend more than €4bn on intelligent process automation software during 2022, with the financial services sector the most significant single industry sector.

But are these investments hitting the mark?

Yes they are – to an extent, says the report. Conventional document process automation solutions based on robotic process automation (RPA) are helping to drive efficiency, improve quality and eliminate bottlenecks by automating the capture, extraction, validation, and processing of relevant data from a variety of document formats.

But these solutions only look at structured and semi-structured documents and cannot relate data to business logic. Until now, intelligent document processing software was not able to apply a higher level of context to the meaning of the data. For example, in a legal document, understanding that “John Smith” is not just a person, but also a defendant’s legal representative.

Likewise, current approaches using optical character recognition (OCR) to convert paper documents into PDF files simply create another source of unstructured data that a business cannot harness directly.