Financial Services Solutions

Compliance

For financial institutions, a growing diversity of regulations on a variety of levels — state, federal, and international — now make up a patchwork of compliance requirements with sometimes overlapping applications.

Each of these emerging regulatory challenges ― Sarbanes-Oxley compliance (SOX), international accounting standards compliance (IAS), anti–money-laundering reporting, and Basel II Capital Accord reporting for both internal and regulator use ― depend on demonstrating the transparency of financial and risk information and require the consolidation of vast amounts of data. Implementing compliance will be costly for many, placing more demands on resources, taking time to implement, and requiring additional funding if external expertise must be brought in.

The purpose of Basel is to revise the existing international standards used to measure the viability of a bank's capital. To calculate the required capital adequacy and offer a transparent view of risk information, financial institutions must store and maintain records dating back at least seven years and covering every part of their organization.

Providing reporting at this level is very time consuming as it involves wading through vast quantities of risk data relating to millions of customers across all their products. Basel II then requires institutions to be able to quickly and accurately publish enterprise-wide consolidated reports on risks, capital and risk management ― an onerous task if data is trapped in multiple silos. Demonstartng good corporate governcace for SOX compliance requires a similarly transparent view of bank accounting data from multiple sources.

Solution Description

Powerful business intelligence solutions like Panorama NovaView 5.0, however, enable banks to consolidate mountains of risk data from systems and spreadsheets into a risk data warehouse. BI then identifies the overlapping information that needs to be available for inspectors and reports. It is then possible to ensure the soundness of internal controls with reports on control status, improvement plans and actions.

When making efforts to comply with SOX, for example, BI tools deter the use of any loopholes or misrepresentation of data before a CEO can sign off on the data and attest that it is correct.

For Basel compliance, Panorama’s advanced BI solutions facilitate the improvement of capital allocation by consolidating, analyzing and reporting on risk information. This allows critical information to be captured and communicated across the company, giving executives one place to monitor priority out-of-bounds controls, accounting information and KPIs. It also gives analysts and accountants the access they need to drill down and explore data in granular detail.

Cedacri

Cedacri is a leading IT provider for financial institutions in Italy. With a turnover of €134.9 million in 2002, 552 employees and a clientele of 66 banks, Cedacri is a market leader in IT services.
...see full case study