One of the Worlds Largest Banks
Unlocking the Value of Data with Self-Reporting
Our client is one of the world's leading banks, with a strong position in Europe and a significant presence in the Americas and Asia Pacific. The financial services company provides banking services to corporations, governments, institutional investors, small and medium-sized businesses, and private individuals.
Complex Regulations and Structure Made for Complicated Reporting
As an international bank with its global headquarters in Europe, our client maintains its financial records in the United States, according to U.S. GAAP standards, while requiring all entities to be reported against the IFRS standard for consolidation with all other global entities for home office reporting.
In order to comply with the two accounting standards – not to mention a broad set of operating units, products, organizations,currencies, and reporting requirements – the firm’s general ledger and associated consolidation systems are necessarily complex. With numerous multi-tiered structural hierarchies for cost/profit centers, consolidation groups, regulatory and management reporting lines, product classifications, etc.,understanding where and how to retrieve pertinent information for a given query or report can be a daunting task.
Driven by the requirement for foreign bank organizations (FBO) to form an Intermediate Holding Company (IHC) as mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, the bank needed a solution for unifying its management reporting into a single, reconciled source.
Cross-Platform Solution Unites Disparate Data
We were engaged to architect, construct, and implement a management information system that aligned financial data from various source systems, and provided the information in a concise, precise, and simple-to-navigate manner.
In keeping with the client’s standards, Cognos was selected as the tool that enables users to interact with data, Oracle as the database to house all data elements, Informatica as the transformation tool, and Java and SQL scripts for specialized code, as needed.
The first project phase was to extract the lowest-level financial data from each identified source system, tracing each step in the data’s summarization and consolidation, along each of the key reporting dimensions. With the path from detail to summary understood, we documented all the points where the financial data could be linked between the various sources or triangulated through a common dataset. These linkages served as the anchors where the disparate financial data could be joined for reporting, providing the automated means to leverage all currently available information.
Standardized reports were developed for monthly management and board reporting, while individuals in the various business units and corporate finance areas utilized the facility for ad hoc queries and on-the-fly reports.
Having the financial information presented in a homogeneous and visual manner not only simplified the management reporting function throughout the bank, but also it fostered a greater understanding of the data itself. The ability to pull any available financial information into a pivot table (crosstab) and drill down through the reporting structures simplified variance analysis and the identification of items for attention.
The bank now has all the various data sources presented as a single unified dataset for query and/or reporting.
Results
A Reporting Solution to Bank On
Our client now has all the various data sources presented as a single unified dataset for query and/or reporting.
Leveraging many of the aforementioned data sources, a complete IFRS/US GAAP bridge was constructed that enables the client to walk across accounting standards, highlighting all reclassifications and adjustments, and reconciling items. The solution also enables users to drill deep into the details.
Building on the success of this engagement, our client is now expanding the capabilities of the platform to include additional data sources necessary to enhance risk reporting and the creation of draft regulatory filings.
