RPA IN FINANCE:SUPPORTING

PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT
• Under the guidance of: Batch Members: 2
• Dr.B.Ebenezer Abishek M.Kalpana(17603909)
• Asst.Professor S.Varshini(17603125) Dept of
ECE Dept of ECE
• VISTAS VISTAS

•
 ABSTRACT
As globalization increases its scope, by providing better and more effective
resources, mainly in the technological field, traditional organizations must seek
more efficient processes to overcome the intense competition. Regarding such
trend, this paper aims to assess the gain in efficiency when a process is
automated by a software robot, the so-called Robotic Process Automation
(RPA). To accomplish such a task, a finance process was developed here with
the help of the software provider UiPath. The RPA software provider UiPath
was used in order to develop all the steps of the automation of the process.
From this, a software robot will work through a selected portfolio of stocks to
reach a result when operating with the software MS Excel. Besides, a bridge
between the theoretical aspects of information systems and RPA was also
presented here.
 OBJECTIVE

 to develop a finance process with the help of the software provider

UiPath.
 To use “software robots” to handle repetitive tasks traditionally
handled by human employees.
 A software robot will work through a selected portfolio of stocks to
reach a result when operating with the software MS Excel.
 SCOPE OF THE PROJECT
• RPA software fully or partially automates human activities. Many
activities are manual, rulebased, and repetitive. It works by replicating the
actions of an actual human interacting with one or more software
• Finance in RPA has no working hour limitations. They can run 24/7/365,
increasing productivity to levels traditional work can’t reach.
 INTRODUCTION
• New technologies such as RPA have been receiving a myriad of
attention lately by all classes of businesses and academia. This awareness,
in the case of RPA, is perhaps happening because of all the rumors about
the potential gains in productivity and the decrease of costs associated to a
robot performing activities that are related to business processes, without
rest and with a very low error rate.
•In this context, the objective of this research is to demonstrate
practically the promised gain in productivity by developing and deploying
a software robot to emulate the steps needed to complete a process that is
rule-based and has the desired characteristic of being exhaustive and
comprising lots of standard files. Also, we will introduce some of the main
features encountered in the actual literature about this technology and the
correlated developments about business processes in the next section.
• Briefly describing the approach of the practical case, the RPA software
provider UiPath was used in order to develop all the steps of the
automation of the process. From this, a software robot will work through a
selected portfolio of stocks to reach a result when operating with the
software MS Excel.
 LITERATURE SURVEY
• Roszkowska and Prorokowski (2017) investigate the contemporary role of
banks’ treasuries and show how the treasury function is being transformed
across the banking sector. They use a sample of international surveys of
banks representing both emerging and advanced markets. Roszkowska and
Prorokowski (2017) analyze the current and future challenges faced by
treasuries. The analysis enables comparison of how the treasury
departments their search of revenue diversifcation under the conditions of
tighter credit and liquidity and what are the problems associated with
treasury products ofering as part of the revised strategies.
• Polak et al. (2011) discuss the role of the modern corporate treasurer in a
multinational company and its transformation in response to current
challenges companies and treasurers face. According to Polak et al. (2011),
the most signifcant incident driving change in the role of the corporate
treasurer is the credit crisis that occurred in 2007–2011.
 LITERATURE SURVEY
• Moosa and Ramiah (2017) provide a concise analysis of behavioral
biases and their implications for fnancial decision-making. Moosa and
Ramiah (2017) claim that narcissism of corporate treasurers is
demonstrated as prevalent behavior in the fnance industry and that it
led to the eruption of the global fnancial crisis (Moosa and Ramiah
2017).
• Zeidan and Shapir (2017) show that according to state of the art,
described in the literature, corporate treasurers overinvest in working
capital and that these investments are economically inefcient. Zeidan
and Shapir (2017) in their study decompose working capital
investments in the cash conversion cycle and growth efects in the
presence of x-inefciency. Zeidan and Shapir (2017) predict that
reductions in the cash conversion cycle should increase shareholder
value. Zeidan and Shapir (2017) suggest that cash-oriented treasury
management, controlling for effects on operating margins, results in
higher stock prices and profitability, and increased cash flow.
 LITERATURE SURVEY
• RESEARCH ON COST MANAGEMENT OPTIMIZATION OF
FINANCIAL SHARING CENTER BASED ON RPA by YU LIAN
QIU,GUO FANG XIAO. Based on thre Robot Process Automation
(RPA),cost management process optimization and improvement were
made on the cross-system data acquisition,”cloud purchasing
platform” construction,and comprehensive multi-dimensional cost
analysis.
• M. Romao, J. Costa and C. J. Costa, “Robotic Process Automation: A Case
Study in the Banking Industry”, 2019, IEEE. Immature or not well-trained
models can eventually decrease productivity and increase errors from
unsupported or even wrong decisions. In this the banking sector,
which illustrates some examples of benefits and risks arising from
BPM solutions that use AI-related agents/artifacts.
 LITERATURE SURVEY
• “Intelligent” fInance and treasury management: what we can expect
Petr Polak1,2 · Christof Nelischer3  · Haochen Guo4  ·
David C. Robertson5 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of
Springer Nature 2019.It is used in many felds of treasury
management, such as early warning of potential fnancial crisis,
diagnosis of fnancial risk, control of fnancial information data quality
and mining of hidden fnancial data, information, etc.
EXISTING METHOD DISADVANTAGES
1. Technology – Improper bot design may impact existing IT infrastructure.
Conversely, routine IT platform changes may impact automation solutions.
2. Regulatory compliance – Automation errors can reduce accuracy of
regulatory reports, risking fines and sanctions as well as legal violations.
3. Operations – Increased processing errors can be caused by badly designed
automation solutions. Lack of effective oversight procedures can lead to
increased operational inefficiencies.
4. Talent – In times of organizational transformation, morale may suffer if
communications to employees don’t focus on the higher level work they’ll
be able to perform with RPA results. Further, access to and oversight of
automated processes must be carefully managed to prevent and detect
abuse.
5. Financial reporting – Poorly implemented finance and accounting robotic
process automation can result in inaccurate or incomplete financial reports,
financial restatements and reputational damage.
 PROPOSED METHOD
ADVANTAGES
• better strategic use of employee time
• reduction of repetitive, manual work
• reduction of human error
• improved internal controls by testing wider sets of data
• improved visibility into future risks and opportunities by
testing wider data sets.
PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
 PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
•Firstly, we created an initial MS Excel file with the names of the 10 selected stocks
and all the formulas to calculate returns, variances and covariances, let’s call it by EX1.
•Now, inside the realm of UiPath Studio, we selected the ‘Excel Application Scope’
activity and dragged to the main workflow, entered the path of EX1 in the
‘WorkbookPath’ property and selected a ‘Read Row’ activity to perform an action
inside the excel file already located. Inside this activity we indicated the sheet and the
starting cell to read, and created a variable as output, let's call this as V1.
• Under the ‘Excel Application Scope’, another activity was dragged, ‘Open
Browser’, to access the website indicated as “finance.yahoo.com”. Inside this activity,
the ‘Click’ activity was used to disperse a popup box that appears when accessing the
web page indicated in the hidden mode of the browser Google Chrome. After that, a
‘For Each’ activity that uses the variable V1 to perform the loop was dropped in the
main workflow. Then, we dropped a ‘Type Into’ and three ‘Click’ activities
sequentially in order to type the name of the stock inside the search box of the web
page, and then clicking in the button of search, select ‘Historical Data’ and finally
download a csv file, which will be called as C1.
 PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
• Continuing, another ‘For Each’ was used under the previous. This activity
will also use the variable V1 to perform the loop and a ‘Move File’ activity will
move the C1 downloaded to a path indicated in the properties panel of the
activity.
• Then, a ‘Read CSV’ was added in order to read the content of C1 and
transform into a data table variable, called since now as V2.
• A column for the future calculations of the daily returns was created by
adding an ‘Add Data Column’ activity, which uses V2 as ‘DataTable’ property
to modify it. Another ‘Excel Application Scope’ activity was added and this
time a MS Excel file will be created instead of read, it will be EX2. For this a
path should be written in the ‘WorkbookPath’ property.
• So, a ‘Write Range’, a ‘Write Cell’ a ‘Read Range’ and a ‘Close Workbook’
activities were added and they will read the modified V2 variable and write in
EX2, write the formula of daily returns in EX2, read the calculated returns and
create a variable V3, and close EX2, respectively.
 PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
•Still in the ‘For Each’ activity, another ‘Excel Application Scope’ was added to
open EX1. Inside this, an ‘Assign’ activity was dragged to the body and an integer
variable was created with value 1 as default, let’s call it V3. This ‘Assign’ activity
will add 1 every time V4 is evoked in the loop.
•An activity for transforming numbers in letters was dragged right before the
‘Assign’ activity and uses V4 as input and outputs a variable V5. After that, a
‘Write Range’ activity was used to write in EX1 V3, which is a data table, and a
‘Close Workbook’ activity closes EX1. This for each loop and the other already
mentioned are performed 10 times.
WORKFLOW-UIPATH
STUDIO
 PROPOSED METHOD-
EXPLANATION
• Moving forward, after the end of the performance of both for each loops, another ‘Excel
Application Scope’ was dragged to the main workflow and it opens EX1 to perform the
macro component that uses Solver in MS Excel to optimize the Sharpe index. This is done
by adding a ‘Execute Macro’ activity. Then, a ‘Read Cell’ activity was added to read the
cell in EX1 that gives the orientation of the value of the calculated Sharpe index, and
another variable was stored, V6. Another ‘Read Cell’ activity was added in order to read
the value of the index and create the variable V7, and a ‘Read Range’ activity was further
added to read the range containing the weights and the stocks associated, creating the
variable V8.
•The end of the process is reached by introducing an ‘If’ activity which will read the
variable V6 and then, if success, a ‘Write CSV’ activity will be performed creating a csv
file, let’s call it by C2, that uses V8 as input, After this an ‘Input Dialog’ was added to who
is performing the process input an email address, and this will the variable V9, which will
be used finally to the activity ‘Send Outlook Mail Message’ that sends an email to the
address specified in V9 and with properties defined too. Otherwise, if success is not
reached, a message box will appear, by using the ‘Message Box’ activity in the ‘Else’
property, warning that was not possible to reach a minimum acceptable value for the index.
 SOFTWARE USED

THREE MAIN SOFTWARE PRODUCTS PROVIDED

BY UIPATH ARE:
•UIPATH STUDIO
•UIPATH ROBOT
•UIPATH ORCHESTRATOR
•BPM(Business Process Management)
 REFERENCES
1) M. Romao, J. Costa and C. J. Costa, “Robotic Process Automation: A Case
Study in the Banking Industry”, 2019 ,IEEE14th Iberian Conference on
Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI), Coimbra, Portugal, 2019,
pp. 1-6. doi: 10.23919/CISTI.2019.8760733
2) “Intelligent” finance and treasury management: what we can expect
Petr Polak1,2 · Christof Nelischer3  · Haochen Guo4  ·
David C. Robertson5 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer
Nature 2019.
3) Research On Cost Management Optimization Of Financial Sharing Center
Based On RPA By Yu Lian Qiu, guo Fang Xiao. Based On The Robot
Process Automation (RPA),ICMR 2019 Published In Elseivier B.V Journal
4) Applying robotic process automation (RPA) in auditing: A framework Feiqi
Huang a,⁎, Miklos A. Vasarhelyi b a Marist College, 3399 North Road,
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601, United States b Rutgers, The State University of
New Jersey, 1 Washington Park, Newark, NJ 07102, United States
ELSEIVIER 2019
 REFERENCES
5) Polak P, Robertson DC, Lind M (2011) The new role of the corporate
treasurer: emerging trends in response to the fnancial crisis. Int Res J Finance
Econ 78:48–69
6) Polak P, Masquelier F, Michalski G (2018) Towards treasury 4.0/the
evolving role of corporate treasury management for 2020. Management
23(2):189–197
7) Ramiah V, Zhao Y, Moosa I, Graham M (2016) A behavioural fnance
approach to working capital management. Eur J Finance 22(8–9):662–687
8) Roszkowska P, Prorokowski L (2017) The changing role of a bank’s treasury.
Asia-Pac J Financ Stud 46(6):797–823
10) Zeidan R, Shapir OM (2017) Cash conversion cycle and value-enhancing
operations: theory and evidence for a free lunch. J Corp Finance 45:203–219