INTRODUCTION

Banks today have to contend with increasingly stringent regulations in various stages of development and implementation. Furthermore, new regulations impacting financial institutions at a global, regional and national level continue to be issued at a rapid rate and show no sign of slowing down. The regulators’ aim to shape a stronger financial and economic reality brings about a counter situation whereby operational costs rise as a result of changes in the regulatory landscape and increased pressure is placed on the business environment.

The financial climate of this new era of banking is unarguably complex and unforgiving, and stricter regulations regarding data quality, more frequent reporting and greater aggregation of risk data, IT and operations are proving to be unwieldy to most financial institutions.

 

THE CHALLENGES

New rules such as those included in COREP, FINREP and CRD IV are currently adding to the challenge of collecting and submitting regulatory reports more efficiently, accurately and in a time-efficient manner. Continually emerging regulations demand that banks do more at a time when costs to achieve compliance are under severe strain. This includes improving the quality of information collected and reported and managing change effectively as banks’ responsibilities evolve in line with developments in the regulatory framework.

Financial institutions now need to cater for:

  • Increased complexity surrounding data consolidation requirements
  • Pressures to introduce improved corporate governance practices
  • Cleansing and auditing data for populating reports
  • Reporting to the regulator within the stipulated timeframes
  • Streamlining and implementing consistent calculation processes
  • Managing large quantities of data and using it effectively for internal and external reporting
  • Normalising data coming in from different data sources
  • Re-aligning variations in substance and timing of regulations issued by policy makers

REGULATORY REPORTING SOLUTION

BRSANALYTICS for regulatory compliance takes multiple, disparate data sources into an integrated centralised data architecture. The unified web-based application automates the process of collating statistical and supervisory reports. Developed and supported by a team of professionals holding a unique combination of technical and financial expertise, the application offers a standard engine that has been refined over the years.

Our regulatory reporting solution seamlessly integrates with banks’ existing infrastructure to deliver a system that is both robust and straight forward to implement. Developed with the ease-of-use mindset, BRSANALYTICS provides a clearly defined, standardised data model that is fully scalable for regulatory compliance at branch and/or head office level.

Regular checks and updates in line with regulators’ developments ensure a fully flexible and immediately responsive solution to changes in the regulatory framework. Coupled with the ability to deliver accuracy, timeliness, quality and efficiency in the submission of user-definable period reports starting from daily submissions, BRSANALYTICS gives you added time at the end of the process to conduct report analysis so that any inconsistencies and errors in data gathered are identified and reconciled.

FEATURES

AD-HOC DATA DRILL-DOWNS AND DRILL-UPS REPORTING

Following the submission of reports to the regulator, it is common to receive queries from the regulator on specific figures. The solution provides the facility to address this requirement by allowing easy-to-use data-drilling and ad-hoc analytics.

CUSTOMISABLE ENGINE AND REPORTING

The core engine of the solution allows business users to customise and add business rules to the underlying calculations without any programming interventions. Furthermore, the reporting layer allows changes or additions to the reports, both in terms of content as well as layout. System authorised personnel such as power users may also assign the rights to modify reference data mappings. This shares authority, increases flexibility and prevents changes going by unnoticed and/or being forgotten.

SOLUTION FLEXIBILITY FOR XBRL SUBMISSION FORMAT

Over 30 regulators across the world have mandated XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) as the required electronic reporting format. The primary driver for XBRL adoption is the provision of a systematic reporting framework in which institutions domiciled in different countries may easily be compared. BRSANALYTICS has been developed so that it can be easily extended to support this format (with COREP and FINREP reports bearing over 35,000 data points. Source: EBA), thus satisfying the reporting requirements of such jurisdictions.

DASHBOARD LAYER

The BRSANALYTICS dashboard layer provides a single consolidated view of multi-regional and multi-business-unit activity surrounding the regulatory reporting process. Management and key business-users have critical visibility to regulatory submission risk and other related facets like profitability analysis, KPI monitoring, and consolidation.

SUPPORT AND AUDIT OF FULL REPORTING CYCLE

The solution provides a single environment from which the business user can manage the full reporting cycle; from data loading, to data checking and validations, from data querying, to report generation and report submission. Moreover, the solution keeps track and audits all historic activities.

STANDARD DATA INTERFACE LAYER

The solution provides a standard data interface that clearly defines the data fields and file formats required by the solution to produce the regulatory reports. This facilitates the implementation of the solution by keeping an abstracted layer from any back-end source systems.

CONSOLIDATED GROUP REPORTING

Consolidated reporting requirements of bank subsidiaries vary depending on the country in which they operate. Group reporting of multi-regional banks to head offices is made possible through BRSANALYTICS. The solution provides different reporting views of data as a result of the multiple Chart of Accounts hierarchies that can be structured within the application. This provides easy reporting configurations, be it for internal, subsidiary and/or the group.

SOLUTION INTEGRATION WITH EXISTING SECURITY INFRASTRUCTURE

The implemented solution is integrated with the banks’ existing security infrastructure. This translates into a seamless amalgamation and adoption of security policies within the platform giving peace of mind to IT security entrusted personnel.

BENEFITS

OUT-OF-THE-BOX COUNTRY REPORTING PACKS

BRSANALYTICS provides out-of-the-box reporting packs for specific jurisdictions. This means that once data is loaded into the system, business-users can immediately reap benefits from the solution by generating the reports in the specific format required by the regulator. This also reduces the implementation costs.

STANDARD DATA MODEL AND CENTRALISED FINANCIAL DATA WAREHOUSE

The solution comes with a standard data model that covers a wide spectrum of the finance domain and banking business models. Therefore, once uploaded in the system, the data is automatically consolidated irrespective of any back-end source systems. This reduces implementation time by not having to re-invent the business model but rather making use of a standard data model that is tried and tested in multiple banks. Moreover, the solution is built on a robust data warehouse technology which permits the storage and consolidation of all the data at different aggregation levels, centrally.

SINGLE VERSION OF TRUTH

The underlying mechanism of BRSANALYTICS – to consolidate data from multiple data sources – conducts checks and validations as part of this process thus creating a Single Version of Truth (SVOT) reporting platform for both regulatory and internal financial reporting needs.

DATA CONSISTENCY AND INTEGRITY

BRSANALYTICS ensures that data imported from multiple data sources is consistent. The user is informed of any data anomalies and provides guidance on the location and type of data error to ensure a quick resolution. The business user can also customise the solution through additional validation rules that can be applied automatically by the solution during the upload process.

With standard pre-built interdependencies of data source uploads, BRSANALYTICS provides business users with a logical path of source data to be uploaded. Furthermore, the user is prompted with any data subsets that may need to be re-calculated following manual data interventions to be incorporated into the data load such as adjustments.

WORLD-LEADING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM

The solution is built on a sound Business Intelligence platform identified by Gartner as being the top global leaders in the field.

TRIED AND TESTED IMPLEMENTATION METHODOLOGY

The robust and flexible underlying software solution is complimented by the BRSANALYTICS Standard Professional Implementation Methodology (SPIM), designed from our experience in implementing regulatory reporting solutions over the years with the intention to create a detailed, structured and repeatable implementation process, hence ensuring project success.