Automating Financial Reports with NLG Software Quill™

RESEARCH REPORT

In brief

Financial services reporting requires time and resources, but Accenture’s report suggests an easier approach using Natural Language Generation (NLG).
Accenture is working with Narrative Science to offer its intelligent automation platform, Quill™, to boost reporting speed and quality using NLG.
NLG addresses common pain points financial firms face in their reporting processes, including resource constraints and inconsistency.

Financial firms face extensive reporting requirements, but reports take time and energy to compile—often using a highly routinized approach. If your workforce is struggling to keep pace, you may be eyeing two choices: You can increase your workforce, or … you can automate.

But can automation allow your organization to follow its own processes, incorporating its own custom visualizations and dashboards? Can it produce consistent, high quality results?

Accenture has teamed with software company Narrative Science Inc., tapping its intelligent automation platform, Quill™, to offer a customizable solution that supports large-scale transformation for financial providers. Our Intelligent Report Automation: Insights on Demand paper, provides the details.

Using NLG software, Quill™ can automate repetitive, time-consuming reporting workflows, handling tasks from performing analysis to writing commentary, while improving the speed, consistency and quality of reporting. Our solution does this while still letting enterprises build custom NLG applications.

Quill™ begins by analyzing data, capturing key analytics and applying its NLG engine to establish a framework and then tell a story.

Can NLG ease your pain points?

We’ve identified three pain points typical to financial and regulatory reporting. An effective NLG approach can address all of them:

1. Bandwidth

Keeping up with reporting demand is a constant struggle, complicated by a talent war for skilled analysts and investigators.

2. Lack of consistency

With a growing set of regulations stretching across geographies, sectors and business units, reporting is rarely consistent.

3. No time to create value

When occupied with basic reporting processes, employees don’t have the time or luxury to think strategically.

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One particular area where NLG offers a quick, high return is in reporting that involves repetitive workflow and requires consistency, high quality and speed. Profit and loss reporting is a good example: Some firms spend thousands of hours per year assembling weekly analyses for countries, regions, divisions and branches. A custom NLG engine can perform the same task more quickly and more accurately.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. NLG can be useful in any of the following:

Balance sheet
Profit and loss
Cash flow
Know your customer
Liquidity reporting
Enhanced due diligence
Case management

And much more.

Ready to start with NLG?

Is your financial services firm considering NLG solutions? Data-driven reports based in repeatable logic are good candidates to start with. To build a business case, consider how automation might transform the current state for the chosen reports.

But why stop at one set of reports? In parallel, consider how NLG can become a capability within the organization, making the technology scalable and opening the door for whole function transformation. Benefits from transitioning to NLG can include:

Time and cost savings
More consistent, higher quality reports
Self-service analysis
More effective business intelligence tools
Traceability

Overwhelmed? Let us help. Accenture and Narrative Sciences can provide support at any stage, from building out uses cases to creating a transformation road map to implementation.

Time to intelligently automate financial reports?

In brief