For QA and software testing teams in banking, automation is increasingly a tool for quality, control and scalability rather than simple cost reduction.
At The Bank of East Asia, one of Hong Kong’s longest-established financial institutions, robotic process automation has been embedded into both production operations and testing workflows, helping to stabilise complex processes, reduce error rates and support faster delivery in a highly regulated environment.
Incorporated in Hong Kong in 1918, The Bank of East Asia is a leading Hong Kong-based financial services group listed on The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong.
The bank offers wholesale banking, personal banking, wealth management and investment services through an international network spanning Hong Kong, the Chinese Mainland, Macau, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, the UK as well as the U.S.
The bank claims it was among the first financial services organisations in Hong Kong to adopt automation in 2018, with a focus on eliminating repetitive manual work and streamlining internal and external processes.
For QA, engineering and operations teams, the institution turned to company UiPath to focus on improving data movement between systems, strengthening risk controls and supporting faster response times without waiting for full API integration.
“We have laid a solid foundation to develop additional digital capabilities.”
– Stephen Leung
Stephen Leung, Group Chief Information Officer, General Manager and Head of the Technology and Productivity Division at BEA, positions automation as a foundation for broader digital capability rather than a standalone efficiency initiative.
“Our collaboration with UiPath has been a significant facilitator of our Bank’s digital transformation,” he started. “With operational efficiency largely boosted through automation, we have laid a solid foundation for BEA to develop additional digital capabilities and optimise internal processes, and deliver seamless services both within and outside the Bank.”
One of the earliest use cases focused on card maintenance, a routine but multi-step operation involving multiple departments and systems.
BEA invested in an internal Workflow Management System and extended it with UiPath robots operating at the user interface level, allowing data to be transferred between otherwise isolated applications when APIs were not technically feasible or not yet available. The combined workflow improved responsiveness while enabling more precise risk controls and mitigations.
Automation has also been applied directly to the software testing lifecycle.
As BEA revamps its corporate cyberbanking platform, known internally as the Corporate Digital Channel, the number of user acceptance tests increased sharply. Manual configuration of test data became a bottleneck for delivery teams, consuming time and introducing avoidable inconsistencies.
To address this, BEA’s RPA team developed a UiPath robot to automatically generate customer information records and establish CASA accounts for UAT testing.
Setup time was reduced from an average of 20 minutes to one minute, improving efficiency while lowering error rates and allowing testing teams to scale coverage without additional manual effort.
At an enterprise level, automation is now embedded across multiple divisions. BEA reports that UiPath deployments have already saved more than 553,000 aggregated processing hours.
Currently, 77 attended automation processes are in use, delivering annual savings of around 29,000 hours and absorbing workload growth without compromising quality or control.
Looking ahead, BEA has defined a roadmap to expand automation through citizen development, enabling staff without technical backgrounds to improve their own workflows using automation tools. The strategy reflects a broader shift toward distributing quality improvement across the organisation.
“Our collaboration with UiPath has been a significant facilitator of our Bank’s digital transformation,” Leung concluded, reinforcing the role of automation as a long-term enabler of operational quality, software delivery and resilience.
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