Discover Financial Services Embraces Automation

Discover Financial Services’ mission is to help people spend smarter, manage debt better, and save more to achieve a brighter financial future.

The company delivers award-winning customer service to its nearly 50 million cardholders. But it’s not just customers who benefit from Discover’s commitment to bright futures — employees do, too. The company is dedicated to eliminating boring, repetitive work from employees’ daily lives with the help of intelligent automation. This enables employees to up-skill in new areas and become a more productive digital workforce.

Establishing a Solid Hub with Many Spokes

Discover set out to identify manual processes across their business and then optimize and automate them. Using intelligent automation, they aimed to add business value by eliminating hours of manual workflow. 

Since Discover operates in a complex and highly regulated industry, they needed strict governance for their new program. With guidance from the SS&C | Blue Prism Robotic Operating Model (ROM™), Discover established an effective hub-and-spoke organizational model that manages more than 200 automated processes. Each spoke resides in a separate business unit — from card operations to finance and HR — and has a representative who understands the respective technologies. The spokes focus on delivering automations aligned to strategic business-unit priorities, while the hub provides governance and IT infrastructure.

Cultivating Internal Talent

The hub-and-spoke operating model is enabling Discover to elevate employees by offering them new opportunities. Leaders are putting a premium on current employees’ institutional and industry knowledge and training them on the technology instead of hiring externally. As a result, Discover is rapidly scaling their automation program and creating new career paths for employees interested in technology.

Discover is driving the adoption of the technology by fostering a fun, vibrant community of employee developers. They host forums to talk about technical solutions and best practices and share issues they’re facing. Interest is high — 1,500 employees attended a summit to learn more about intelligent automation and explore available jobs on the team. These activities have led to a 400% increase in process automation candidates. Members of each spoke are encouraged to reuse automation objects developed by other groups, a practice that is significantly reducing development cycle times.

Employees working in each of the business units are benefiting, as well. In the card operations department, employees are excelling with customer interaction while automation is entering and validating card-related data.

Discover has realized significant benefits from its intelligent automation program. With more than one million annualized hours returned, the value of the investment in automation has enabled Discover to be hyper focused on adding value to customers and be more efficient in that pursuit.

Download the full case study to learn more on how Discover Financial Services are connecting employees with intelligent automation.