Data driven solutions: Smart software products for financial companies

Despite a large number of digitalisation initiatives, IT landscapes in the financial services sector continue to be typically rigid IT architectures and processes, including a huge diversity of in-house developments. New technologies and platforms, such as big data, the cloud, artificial intelligence, or the like, are often in the course of being widely adopted. While these offer great potential, it can take years before they are used efficiently and productively. The implementation of growing regulatory requirements and the need for significantly greater automation of processes often cannot be achieved in a timely manner, or only at a high cost and with much effort.

That’s where we come in: With our Data Driven Solutions Factory, we offer smart technical solutions and products that help our customers to achieve higher automation and quality in their control processes, especially when dealing with regulatory issues.

We place particular emphasis on practicality, which we achieve by adapting where necessary – which means that our solutions rapidly find acceptance among users and can significantly increase the efficiency and quality of process flows.

The regulatory requirements for maintaining an inventory of individual data processing or end user computing (EUC) are substantial, and the complexity and number of EUC technologies deployed keeps on rising. For many companies, an efficient implementation of the requirements is therefore a major challenge – both for the central units responsible for managing individual data processing, as well as for the employees in the business departments.

The EUC Portal is a modern, web-based application that provides comprehensive support for individual data processing management processes with high usability and user acceptance. Mass analysis of files on file shares can identify potential EUC programs, and they can be assessed via customisable questionnaires. Workflow support with additional customisable forms helps to build an inventory and manage the continuous maintenance and review of EUCs.

• The EUC inventory is carried out efficiently, with high percentage completeness and a comprehensible classification.
• By using customer-customisable analysis models and forms, operational effort is reduced and acceptance is increased.
• The EUC Portal brings transparency to the EUC landscape, including the combined effects on files and systems, and thus uncovers potential synergies from the consolidation and replacement of EUCs.

Learn more about the EUC Portal in just 3 minutes with our video.

Frequently it is not possible to implement either regular management reports or ad hoc requests in a timely manner through the existing IT processes and using existing applications. As a result, business departments start developing their own, mostly Excel/Access-based solutions (End User Computing or EUC), with functionality and complexity that grows over the years, involving a high level of manual maintenance and operating costs, as well as a high risk of errors.

We replace existing EUCs with data processing solutions using existing technologies (ETL/data integration tools, relational databases) already present in the business. Professional reverse engineering and comprehensive regression testing ensure that the functionality and business rules of the EUCs are correctly replicated so that they now exist in a transparent, easy-to-maintain structure using modular workflows.

• A higher level of automation of the overall processing of data integration, including calculations and reporting
• Improved data and reporting quality through comprehensive technical and business rule data validations
• Automated generation of data marts that can be used flexibly
• Automated report generation in different output formats (e.g. XLSX, PDF, HTML)

The European Banking Authority regularly conducts stress tests. The data required for these is often not available at the required granularity and quality. Both the data quality and the stress test governance, for such things as the number of submissions in the ECB’s STAR portal, flow into the assessment of the bank and therefore into the own funds requirement (SREP).

With our QUEST software, we can provide a variety of automated data quality checks, within the stress test templates, as well as comprehensive validation for regulatory reports (FINREP, COREP). The intuitive user interface and presentation of the error reports, together with the high performance when performing validations, are important elements for effective use and support in the stress test.

• Automated validation of data consistency and compliance with methodological specifications
• Huge time savings in consolidating deliveries due to high quality of delivered data
• Reduction in re-submissions and potentially negative feedback from the EBA/ECB

Annual licensing costs for legacy databases such as Oracle and IBM DB2 are often in the 1- or 2-digit millions range for large enterprises. Until now, the lack of professional and cost-effective alternatives, as well as lengthy migration projects, have made it impossible to break out of this vendor lock-in.

With our database transformation solution, we are helping customers move the totality of their legacy databases across to EnterpriseDB, a modern and cost-effective professional open source platform. With the use of our tried and tested and flexibly adjustable Migration Factory, we can achieve a high degree of automation when carrying out the migration, thus minimising costs and risks.

By moving to EnterpriseDB, customers have shown proven savings of up to 90% of annual licensing costs, while maintaining stability and security. Payback usually occurs within the first 12-18 months.