Founded in 1952, the National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) is the largest financial institution in Kuwait, with branches and subsidiaries in China, Geneva, London, Paris, New York, and Singapore, and a regional presence across the Middle East in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Turkey, and the UAE. Recently, the bank summarized the results of the very first RPA (Robotic Process Automation) hackathon in the region. Here are a digest of that.
National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) hosted the NBK RPA Hackathon, the online competition conducted in collaboration with Blue Prism, where participants were challenged to improve the bank’s operational efficiency and service quality through automation. Since NBK’s automation journey began four years ago – dozens of processes have been automated throughout the bank – creating a digital workforce that excels at speed and accuracy. Currently, NBK’s intelligent automation lab uses RPA bots to automate routine tasks in the domains of card processing, compliance, fraud detection and more. NBK has since been named a leader in the RPA category by Gartner for three years in a row.
NBK’s RPA team and Blue Prism’s developers welcomed and encouraged participants to kick off the competition. Hackathon participants received their challenges to show their automation skills and deliver the best possible automation solution to impress the jury. These projects were then evaluated by both NBK and Blue Prism executives. Awards included cash prizes and potential opportunities to join NBK’s RPA team. During the hackathon day, participants tackled their challenges using Blue Prism’s online platform and were tasked to submit their projects by the end of the day.
Mr. Mohammad Al-Kharafi, General Manager, Head of Group Operations at National Bank of Kuwait, congratulated all the winners on their well-deserved success and also made a summary of the Hackathon:
“With the NBK RPA Hackathon, we sought to both enrich the efforts of our automation processes and attract international talent to expand our RPA team. Certified Blue Prism developers from all over the world were encouraged to answer our challenges and participate in the online event. In addition to providing opportunities to join the RPA team, we are recruiting fresh graduate Kuwaitis and are developing them to become experts in this new domain.”