• February 17, 2025
Banco Azteca: Focusing Automation on Customers and Building Trust with Employees

When you think of the traditional and regulated world of financial institutions, the special effects and advanced technology of science fiction don’t usually spring to the top of anyone’s mind. But when Kathia Barrios, a forward-thinking executive at Mexico’s Banco Azteca, first brought the notion of intelligent automation to her COO asking for approval to test the technology, his response was: “That’s like a science fiction movie. Let’s do it!”

COO Manuel Delgado’s response highlights the reality that many countries around the world experience a relatively slower pace of innovation than more developed areas—notably in financial services. In those global markets, the effects of readily available technology like process automation software can seem as powerful and unreachable as The Force.

Banco Azteca is one of Mexico’s largest financial institutions, part of Grupo Salinas, which offers a comprehensive range of financial services, including savings accounts, loans, credit cards, insurance, and investment options. Barrios’s background was not IT, it was finance. But, her ability to envision how process automation software could supercharge an organization—empowering its employees and customers—led to her spearheading the effort at Banco Azteca to implement the technology as the company’s Director of Transformation.

With Delgado’s blessing, and proof of concept established, Barrios chose to begin the bank’s automation journey focusing on areas that directly affected its nearly 30 million customers. Two early successes involved automating the processing of customer disputes by checking ATM logs and the issuance of electronic payment receipts. After that, she began looking for more sophisticated processes to automate. Scaling the technology to other parts of the bank after initial success wasn’t easy.

Building Trust

“In that moment, I felt like I was selling encyclopedias,” Barrios remembers. “I was knocking on every door and meeting with every peer I could think of. ‘You want an automation? Please, this is going to change your life,’ I told them. But many of them either didn’t believe the hype or were nervous that if the bot made a mistake, they would be fired. And some felt if the bot was too good, they would be fired. It was an uphill battle early.”

Building trust with internal customers—bank employees—was difficult, but essential. As Barrios and her team began implementing more and more automations, they began touching increasingly sensitive processes. Business units in charge of these areas, understandably, wanted visibility into exactly how they worked. Barrios says they began to document all the processes and audit the bots that were automating them and showing the audit results to the business lines.

Once employees felt they could trust the accuracy of the automations, the business case took care of itself. The reality of banking in Mexico was that onerous manual processes ruled. Before they were automated, for example, Barrios notes that the bank reconciled millions of remittances a year from the U.S. to Mexico and back on an Excel spreadsheet by hand.

“It sounds like craziness,” she says, “but they were working like that in the past.”

By showing them every step of the way that automations worked and could be trusted, Barrios was able to take the program from a dozen or so early automations to hundreds. And bank staff embraced the transformation. Employee net promoter score, one of the main metrics Banco Azteca uses to assess employee satisfaction, rose from 18 percent in 2021 to 76 percent this year.

Bit by bit, she was able to win them over. But that has resulted in a different problem: attracting and retaining talent.

While Banco Azteca consulted with the UiPath team, whose technology powers intelligent automation at the bank, Barrios has slowly but surely built her own team of developers to handle its needs. And, while finding sufficient IT and automation staff is a problem around the world, Barrios says in Mexico it can be especially difficult.

“Now we have the happy problem of a big backlog of processes to automate, but I really don’t know where I am going to get more developers,” she says. “In Mexico, there are few people trained for RPA. So, what I am doing now is, if a candidate has good developer skills and an interest in automation, I hire them and I am going to train them on our platform.”

Her efforts are working. The organization was recently honored as a winner of the UiPath AI25 Awards, which recognize companies that are using AI and automation from UiPath to enhance productivity and transform experiences.

Focus Remains on Customers

While Banco Azteca’s automation program has soared over the last several years, its focus remains firmly on the goal established when Barrios first went to Delgado with the idea: make it easier for customers to interact with the bank.

From those first pilot tests, Barrios’s automation program has grown to nearly 200 automations designed to optimize diverse processes—many of them consumer facing. For example, 56 percent of banking transaction clarifications, which were handled manually until surprisingly recently, are now resolved in under 24 hours and response times decreased from an average of 13 days to just one.

“We are actually very conscious of why we are doing this: for our children, for every Mexican family that places their trust in us, and for every member of our team,” Barrios says. “We live and work side-by-side with them and they trust us with their savings. We are helping Mexico by having the mindset that customer service should be exceptional.”