“Banks getting bigger is nothing new. The 2019 merger between two big banks, BB&T and SunTrust, which created Truist, was the largest in roughly a decade for the sector, and as big deals do, it led to a review of inefficiencies and opportunities, including in the back office. As Jarel Hawkins, senior vice president of enterprise intelligent automation recently told CNBC at its Technology Executive Council Summit, the infrastructure and architecture was about five years behind and in need of modernization. But it was the pandemic as much as the deal itself which led to one important change in how the company looked at the combination of human workforce and technology.   The use of digital banking boomed during the pandemic lockdowns and that led to an exponential growth in fraud. This led Truist to bring in robotic automation processing company UiPath to scale up its use of bots in the fraud process, and scale it down to the level of low-dollar transactions it previously would not have scrutinized as closely. Fraud was costing the bank a significant amount of money, but previous to the pandemic, employing a human workforce for every charge was not an efficient or economic way to solve the problem. The costs of the fraud were being refunded to consumers, but the bank was not claiming the costs back from payment processors.”