The Future of Business Process Outsourcing: RPA

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) refers to an innovative software – commonly known as a “bot”- used to execute repetitive tasks that are typical for white collar jobs, such as data entry, processing, and analysis, across multiple IT systems. Like traditional automation, RPA can help improve efficiency in almost every sector, helping execute tasks faster and at a lower cost.

Today, digital transformation is the number one priority for many organizations, which means RPA is one of the fastest-growing enterprise software applications within this trend. The AI powered technology allows machines to see, hear, and think as humans do, and to effectively solve both repetitive and complex task. Today more than $200B are spent on Business Process Outsourcing worldwide annually, and RPA has the potential to take a significant share of this spend as the market is rapidly shifting from outsourcing work to humans to outsourcing it to software bots.

According to Gartner, currently, UiPath is the leader in the RPA industry with its over 7000 enterprise customers. By combining Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning, UiPath’s RPA software allows organizations to automate processes which are then executed at a fraction of the cost and time previously spent. What makes UiPath unique is the use of software bots which accurately emulate human actions and automate millions of repetitive office tasks, increasing productivity and freeing up millions of working hours of capacity. UiPath is leading the “automation first” era worldwide by allowing business leaders to scale digital business operations at unprecedent speed.

Another big player in the RPA marketplace is WorkFusion, used mainly by banks and other financial players. WorkFusion allows these companies to automate, optimize, and manage repetitive operations via its AI-powered Intelligent Automation Cloud. The AI powered technology allows bots to read and understand complex documents containing unstructured data, and digitize, classify, make decisions, and extract data from them while minimizing fraud and data theft risks. Most importantly, the bots learn from each new document and activities previously executed, thereby continuously increasing, and improving their level of automation.

The RPA market is soaring from its market size of $250million in 2016 to $2.9billion in 2021, growing at a 63% 5-year CAGR. RPA can become a cornerstone in almost every industry: from finance, insurance, logistics to healthcare. As reported by McKinsey, 60% of all jobs could have at least 30% repetitive, tedious tasks that could be automatable. Automation could replace between 9 to 26% of such activities by 2030.

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The information in this article should not be regarded as a description of services provided by Delian Partners SA. The opinions expressed in this article are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or on any specific security or investment product. It is only intended to provide education about the financial industry. The views reflected in this article are subject to change at any time without notice.

Technology Innovation is Supporting the Digital Ad World

2021 so far is showing an acceleration of the strong growth trend in Digital Advertisement. As businesses re-open worldwide and previously canceled campaigns are resumed, advertisement budgets have been increasingly directed towards Digital Ad because the use of social media platforms and streaming services have risen almost everywhere.

Digital vs. Traditional Ad Spending (US)

Source: eMarketer

Not surprisingly, the main beneficiaries in the Digital Ad ecosystem are Alphabet, Facebook, and Amazon, which all reported strong growth in Ad revenue in 2020. Among these, Alphabet continues to dominate the Digital Ad market: In 2020, Google accounted for about 29% of the total Digital Ad revenue in the US, followed by Facebook and Amazon with 25.2% and 10.3% respectively.

US Digital Ad Revenue Share, By Company, 2019 & 2020

% of Total Digital Ad spending

Source: eMarketer

Google built its success in Digital Ad by leveraging AI software to collect and integrate data from users in a more sophisticated and faster way. While Google’s platforms connect businesses with billions of people every day through Search and YouTube, AI helps them to create highly tailored content based on consumers’ needs and preferences of the moment.

With an impressive 1.87 billion daily active users in 1Q21, Facebook can count on one of the largest and most diverse advertising audience ever and collect a huge amount of data for the benefit of advertisers. Facebook also introduced innovative features to its Ad service: The use of Machine Learning helps determine the likelihood that a given user will act as the advertiser wants, such as visiting the advertiser’s website, installing their app, or buy a product. And then, the algorithm will rank the quality of Ad content through an Ad quality score so that the advertiser can fix the campaign following the best way to achieve his goals.

In recent years, Amazon’s Ad business also experienced a tremendous growth, mainly fueled by the acceleration of online shopping: According to EMarketer, Amazon advertising revenue in the US will surpass $20B in 2021. To keep up with the competition, the e-commerce giant also implemented an AI driven algorithm which analyzes real-time data generated by shoppers’ behavior, allowing advertisers to provide specific content to a narrowly targeted audience.

Digitalization is changing consumers’ behavior and companies must be increasingly data-driven to be able to communicate with people who spend more time navigating through the Internet while scrolling social media, checking emails, or reading the news. Digital Ad is becoming mandatory for companies to attract new customers and build a relationship with their brand.

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The information in this article should not be regarded as a description of services provided by Delian Partners SA. The opinions expressed in this article are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or on any specific security or investment product. It is only intended to provide education about the financial industry. The views reflected in this article are subject to change at any time without notice.