As banks across Europe grapple with rising operational complexity and mounting expectations around quality and resilience, automation is increasingly moving from tactical efficiency play to strategic foundation.
Sweden-based Ikano Bank’s transformation offers a clear example of how structured automation can support both operational excellence and more reliable QA outcomes at scale.
Ikano Bank, a financial institution owned by the family that founded IKEA and headquartered in Malmö, Sweden, serves customers across Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the UK, Poland, Germany and Austria.
Providing finance to both individuals and businesses, the bank has been modernising its operations to lift quality, reduce manual workload and build resilience into its processes.
Automation has become a central pillar of this effort, with the case study showing how software robots now support work across the organisation to improve accuracy and consistency for its 2 million customers and 1,100 employees.
“Possibilities for better living and to simplify the everyday life of the many people” is the vision Ikano Bank describes as placing customers and employees “at the very heart of Ikano Bank.”
This human-centred philosophy underpins its move to automation, freeing staff from repetitive, error-prone processes and enabling a more dependable operational environment for QA teams.
Scaling automation
The bank expanded its automation footprint quickly, with its partner UiPath highlighting that Ikano Bank had 100 automated processes in 2021 and had saved “100,000 hours of work.”
It also recorded “33,500 hours saved in one year, exceeding 2020 KPIs by 300%,” with robots running in “eight countries where robots were deployed.”
Automation initially appeared in fragmented pockets across departments, with the bank noting that “islands of automation had emerged out of curiosity across several departments but a lack of coherence was holding success back.”
The bank responded by creating a central Automation Office to unify development, oversight and maintenance of bots.
Viktor Törner, Manager of the Automation Office, reflects on the scale of transformation: “When I began my career at Ikano Bank, stepping off the train in Älmhult, a small city tucked away in Swedish woodland, a pan-European automation journey wasn’t on my radar.”
He added: “Since 2019 we have automated over 170 processes and saved over one hundred thousand hours of work. What we are most proud of, however, is the real change we have brought to our customers and colleagues.”
A key milestone in the transformation was the rapid identification and delivery of early automation use cases. Törner describes how the bank selected 15 “low-hanging fruit” processes, which were built “in just six months.”
One of the software robots tackled a backlog exceeding 30,000 records requiring name changes in the core banking system, work that had been estimated to require hiring ten employees for hundreds of days. The robot completed the task in weeks.
These automated workflows deliver predictable, repeatable execution that directly supports QA disciplines.
By replacing manual steps with structured robotic processing, Ikano Bank reduces variability, improves data quality and creates more stable conditions for testing, monitoring and release validation.
The bank plans to extend automation to document-heavy processes using Document Understanding and machine learning, which would add further structure and reliability to previously unstructured workflows.
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