Next year is going to be a momentous year for Robotic Process Automation (RPA). This is the process of automating mundane tasks, like taking data from a file and entering it into a business application like CRM software. It is about computerizing repetitive tasks that are an inefficient use of people's time. RPA is not a physical robot. It is an approach to working across multiple business applications and capturing, maintaining, migrating, integrating, extracting, and testing data in spreadsheets. It's the equivalent of an employee who never sleeps, eats, or makes mistakes on tasks that need to be repeated over and over again.
About the author Aaron Harris is Senior Vice President, Head of Engineering and Technology at Sage Intacct. Currently, only large companies capable of using cloud computing services use RPA on a large scale. This is partly due to the vast amount of information they can leverage for Business Intelligence and the AI-based automated tools embedded in these processes. In 2020, we will start to see this phenomenon affect small and medium-sized businesses. RPA software revenue increased 63.1% in 2018 to reach €846 million and will rise further to reach €1.3 billion in 2019. This makes it the fastest growing segment of the global enterprise software market, according to Gartner. RPA provides improved accuracy for automated and repetitive tasks. Two-thirds of financial processes are now automated, in some shape or form. The remaining third is taken up by ad hoc or "human" information requests. The next step in RPA is also to automate these processes. At some point in the future, maybe not next year, but later, more forward-thinking companies will start sharing their business ledgers in real time, thus opening up the possibility of providing instant access to your financial health. This is a zero forecast, which several large companies have indicated as their stated ambition in terms of financial transparency. As an industry, we're not there yet, but RPA is one of many trends leading us to a more automated future. The other key drivers are AI and digital transformation, which help professionals rethink processes to take advantage of digital capabilities, thereby reducing administrative and reporting burden.
The chain of blocks to return?
Blockchain is certainly an ingenious invention, but it went through what Gartner calls in its hypercycles the void of disillusionment. He has promised a lot but delivered very little to date. Since it became the “next big thing”, there have been very few meaningful applications for blockchain in the real world. So what is stopping blockchain from being widely adopted? There are a few things here, but overall, it all comes down to cost, scalability, and trust. With industry leaders like Amazon or Microsoft committing to building blockchain services, we will start to see accelerated adoption as they get there. Address issues that previously held you back from reaching the mainstream, with real-world solutions coming into play starting in 2020.
A blessing of virtual money
Facebook's new virtual currency, Libra, has the potential to change the future of payments. Your goal is to solve a real world problem and it could be huge. In the past, virtual currencies were only useful as a reserve of currency. Libra, on the other hand, is the first electronic money that has potential as a medium of exchange. Facebook's strength is its large user base. It now has a network of 2 billion people, a third of the world's population. If, for example, a migrant worker wanted to return money to his country of origin, he would face a 6% to 20% increase in foreign exchange and bank transfers. It is also risky and slow. If a family used Facebook, they could convert their local currency to Libra and use Facebook Messenger to send the money back to their family. It's fast, easy and quite secure. This also solves the problem of money laundering. In today's system of paper financial transactions, there can be little or no record of where money comes or goes. The United Nations recently estimated that the proceeds of crime laundered each year represent between 2 and 5% of global GDP, or between $1,6 and $4 trillion per year. Digital currency, on the other hand, produces an immutable software record of every transaction made, where it came from, and where it goes. It is like a distributed cryptographically protected ledger for currencies and it is much more difficult to launder money. There are a number of regulatory and legislative issues that need to be overcome. It is a disruptive technological solution that challenges the very notion of a centralized monetary system. The G7 countries have even formed a working group to examine the issue of cryptocurrencies, with a particular focus on Libra. But as long as it can prove its real worth, I can see at least one of the recently launched virtual currencies really taking off in 2020.