SpareBank 1 Nord-Norge, part of the SpareBank 1 alliance of 13 Norwegian banks operating under a single brand, is quietly reshaping how automation, quality and operational resilience are delivered in regional banking.
Headquartered in Northern Norway, the bank serves communities across a region that spans traditional industries such as fishing and aquaculture alongside fast-growing technology and tourism sectors, offering services ranging from consumer accounts and business banking to loans and pensions.
Like many banks with deep regional roots, SpareBank 1 Nord-Norge manages a high volume of manual paperwork, data entry and administrative processes across its operations.
As customer expectations increased and systems grew more complex, these manual steps became a growing source of delay, inconsistency and operational risk. In response, the bank began investing in robotic process automation (RPA) as early as 2016, establishing a central centre of excellence (CoE) to prioritise large-scale automation initiatives across the enterprise.
Alongside this formal programme, a parallel, grass-roots automation effort began to take shape inside the business.
In 2019, Cathrine Pettersen, who was working on efficiency improvements in one of the bank’s largest departments covering customer service and product management, saw an opportunity to address service bottlenecks directly.
“Customers often waited a long time,” she explained. “We asked for help from the CoE, but they needed to focus on larger scale automations, so we decided to act ourselves. We did a few tests and decided that this was something we wanted to work with. We got permission to buy some licences and started up.”
The first automations targeted business customer requests for online banking, a process dominated by paper documents, manual checks and repeated data entry. Each request took around six minutes to complete, and with roughly 2,500 requests per year, the workload was both time-consuming and error-prone.
“We started small,” Pettersen said. “But the difference was big. With our new robot, we managed to increase speed by 80 percent and cut mistakes by 70 percent,” she added.
Immediate impact
For QA and testing teams, the impact was immediate: fewer manual touchpoints, more consistent execution and clearer process outcomes.
The automations were delivered as attended robots, allowing employees to remain in control while building trust in the technology.
According to Pettersen, staff response was overwhelmingly positive.
“People loved it. The process had previously involved copying and pasting and now they could hand it all over. The production-team had one day every week where they managed the attended robots. One of the co-workers actually said, ‘this is my favourite day of the week’.”
Encouraged by these results, the team expanded its efforts, building additional automations to support consumer account teams with tasks such as card ordering and account opening.
The approach soon spread beyond customer service into credit operations, where Øyvind Kolstad, a credit advisor handling loan defaults and bankruptcies, faced similar challenges.
“I manage loan defaults and bankruptcies,” he explained. “While we have lots of manual reports to create and check, we were not prioritised by the CoE. So, I learnt how to build my own robots.”
Kolstad’s first automation addressed a list of around 17,000 securities and assets containing incorrect data that previously required manual correction. Using RPA, the task was completed in a single day.
“It’s not just changed my working day, but my whole department’s working year,” he said. “I’ve been lucky that my boss understands the value of RPA. This has allowed me to dedicate time to automations.”
Together, Pettersen and Kolstad have become advocates of citizen development within SpareBank 1 Nord-Norge, demonstrating how controlled, business-led automation can coexist with central governance.
To date, the team has built 25 automations, supported by around 20 attended robots, while ensuring oversight and coordination with the CoE.
“My colleagues think I’m doing magic,” Kolstad says. “But it’s not hard. You can learn plenty just by being curious.”
“I’ve been lucky that my boss understands the value of RPA. This has allowed me to dedicate time to automations.”
– Øyvind Kolstad
From a digital resilience perspective, the approach has reduced reliance on manual processes, improved consistency and freed skilled staff from repetitive work. The team has also taken care to address concerns about automation and job displacement.
“We told them a robot could never replace a person,” Kolstad says. “It can take on the copying and pasting, but humans still need to make decisions and manage the automation. Also, we believe that skilled people shouldn’t have to do dull jobs. RPA allows them to do more interesting things.”
Looking ahead, the team plans to deepen its collaboration with the CoE, invest in additional UiPath capabilities and expand the use of unattended robots as confidence grows.
“To date, we’ve just used the basic packages,” Pettersen explains. “We kept track of our impact with a spreadsheet, but in the future will invest in Insights, to see how we’re saving the business time and money.”
For software testing and QA teams, SpareBank 1 Nord-Norge’s experience shows how bottom-up automation, when aligned with governance and security, can deliver tangible improvements in quality, speed and resilience.
As Pettersen boldly stated: “We’ve only just started. Come back in a year and see what we’ve achieved.”
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