Ikano Bank saves 100,000 hours annually by scaling RPA across 8 countries

Ikano Bank faced heavy administrative burdens from manual processes across 8 European countries, serving a large customer base and 1,100 employees. Automation efforts had emerged in isolated pockets across IT and finance departments, but a lack of coherence and governance prevented meaningful progress. Employees had grown skeptical after an extended period of promises with little tangible delivery.

Ikano Bank established a centralized Automation Office and adopted UiPath as its single RPA platform. The team deployed 15 initial bots in six months to rebuild confidence, then scaled across all 8 countries with 40 automation collaborators acting as champions in each business unit. Key automations included name-change record updates, COVID-19 payment deferral processing, and real-time IKEA financing eligibility checks via API integration.

By 2021, Ikano Bank had automated 100 processes, saving 33,500 hours in one year—exceeding 2020 KPIs by 300%—and targeting 100,000 hours saved for 2021. The IKEA financing bot attracted 50,000 new customers over a relatively short period. A CRM-to-broker API bot for the Danish branch was projected to generate 30 million DKK in sales. Robots were deployed across all 8 countries.

• Start with quick wins to rebuild employee confidence before attempting enterprise-wide scale; deploying 15 low-hanging fruit bots in a short timeframe was the turning point.
• Embedding automation champions in every country and department is critical for identifying high-value processes in locally-specific IT environments.
• COVID-19 created an unexpected forcing function that demonstrated RPA's business continuity value, with payment deferral bots responding to customers in under a minute.