“With increased complexity in the development of banking regulation and statutory reporting requirements, increased demands were being placed on the Finance Department to ensure that the Bank’s high reporting standards were maintained. At the same time, internal reporting was becoming more challenging due to increased head office reporting requirements. The Bank needed a strong and reliable software solution to be able to handle these increased requirements with more efficiency. At the same time, we needed to have full control over all aspects of data generation and reporting cycles. BRSANALYTICS was seen as the ideal solution.”

“Prior to the installation, the Bank embarked on an extensive internal ETL project to create data interfaces and a local data warehouse, thus facilitating the deployment of the BRSANALYTICS tool.”

“BRSANALYTICS integrated fully with our data management systems. Reporting processes have been streamlined and became more efficient, leaving more time for the Finance Department to focus on reporting quality. BRSANALYTICS has now become a critical component of the Bank’s reporting tools that are required in order to meet our strict internal and external reporting deadlines.”

Edward Grech
Chief Financial Officer
MFC Merchant Bank Ltd (Former BAWAG Malta Bank)

OVERVIEW

One of Austria’s leading banking groups, BAWAG PSK, has chosen BRSANALYTICS for its subsidiary in Malta. The Bank started operating in 2003 and mainly concentrates on commercial banking services and project finance in the upper market, offering loan and deposit services to the public and private sectors in Malta and the Mediterranean and North African regions. With its strong capital base, BAWAG Bank Malta is also a partner for international syndications and structured finance transactions.

Operating in both local and international markets, the Bank deployed the solution in 2012 in order to facilitate supervisory and prudential, as well as internal financial management-related reporting processes.

The decision to adopt BRSANALYTICS is a reflection of the Bank’s commitment to maintaining top-level standards in its corporate governance practices and its operations locally.

MAIN OBJECTIVES

The Bank run Temenos T24 as their core solution and opted to deploy BRSANALYTICS to automate the regulatory reporting process in order to deliver higher quality data to the regulators. The following main requirements were identified and subsequently fulfilled:

  1. The Bank required a solution that could streamline the otherwise lengthy and fragmented reporting cycles, thereby rendering them more efficient.
  2. Technical processes needed to be transparent to business users and the regulatory reporting solution had to function seamlessly with the Bank’s core back-end systems
  3. External and internal reporting processes had to be facilitated by the newly deployed solution

BUSINESS BENEFITS

BRSANALYTICS has proven to deliver significant benefits to Banks:

  • A reduction in the time needed to prepare regulatory reports. Faster reporting ultimately gives users the time to focus on analysing data and its implications. Generating reports used to take a number of days to produce, whereas with BRSANALYTICS this has been distilled to a number of hours, providing the bank with more time to ensure that financial data is aligned with the Bank’s business strategy.
  • The solution allowed the Bank/ to retrieve and collate a large number of reports including Balance of Payments (BOP), Assets and Liabilities, Liquidity, Loans and Deposits, Interest Rates as well as Transaction Movements.
  • Finance and Business Users manage the entire reporting cycle within BRSANALYTICS in an efficient and logical manner thereby relieving pressures from the Bank’s IT resources.
  • The Bank is currently in the process of implementing BRSANALYTICS V2 that will incorporate an additional visualisation layer for providing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) out-of-the-box.
  • Ad-hoc reports can be created within the Excel environment used for internal management.
  • Although complex in nature, the implementation took around 45 days to complete with no business disruption and with minimal time and input required from the key business users.

The Bank now benefits from a significant increase in productivity in the Finance and IT department, has the ability to compile a much larger number of reports and is able to manage the regulatory reporting cycle in a simple and logical manner.

THE WAY FORWARD

CONSOLIDATED GROUP REPORTING

Following the success of automating the regulatory reporting pack, the Bank will soon embark on a project to provide reports to its head office.  Group reporting has different requirements depending on the various countries in which they operate.  With the latest BRSANALYTICS we can provide different reporting views of the data due to the multiple Chart of Accounts hierarchies that can be built within the application. This provides easy reporting structures whether internally, to subsidiaries and/or the group.

CREDIT RISK

The initial aim for BRSANALYTICS will be to provide an engine that is able to calculate the necessary risk weights and Credit Risk Weighted Assets under the Standardised Approach. A possibility exists for banks to provide us with the calculated data for Own Funds, Market Risk and Operational Risk capital requirements so that BRSANALYTICS can calculate the Capital Ratio including Tier One and Tier Two Capital ratios. These figures could be entered manually and the system would be able to calculate the ratios and present charts to visually describe the results.

FOREIGN ACCOUNT TAX COMPLIANCE (FATCA)

FATCA, which was enacted as part of the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act of 2010, requires financial institutions to use enhanced due diligence procedures to identify US persons who have invested in either non-US financial accounts or non-US entities. The intent behind FATCA is to keep US persons from hiding income and assets overseas.

Multinational financial institutions will need to make significant process and technology changes to comply with FATCA. Financial institutions should consider steps such as performing a current state assessment of your systems and operations and conducting gap analyses against your identified requirements to make sure that all required data is or can be captured by the back-end systems.

Additional reporting requirements will require up-front information gathering and tracing various data elements and business rules. BRSANALYTICS is designed to cater for these additional reporting requirements and more.

At the time of publishing, MFC Merchant Bank was known as BAWAG Malta Bank.
MFC Merchant Bank (former BAWAG Malta Bank) grant Computime Ltd their non-exclusive permission to publish and distribute copies of this case study to the public, in the final form as discussed and agreed to with the Bank.