Written by Mike Russo, Senior Industry Principal, Financial Services at SAP
Welcome to the regulatory world of banking, where finance and risk must join forces to ensure compliance and control. Today it’s no longer sufficient to manage your bank’s performance using finance-only metrics such as net income. What you need is a risk-adjusted view of performance that identifies how much revenue you earn relative to the amount of risk you take on. That requires metrics that combine finance and risk components, such as risk-adjusted return on capital, shareholder value added, or economic value added.
While the smart money is on a unified approach to finance and risk, most banking institutions have isolated each function in a discrete technology “silo” complete with its own data set, models, applications, and reporting components. What’s more, banks continually reuse and replicate their finance and risk-related data – resulting in the creation of additional data stores filled with redundant data that grows exponentially over time. Integrating all this data on a single platform that supports both finance and risk scenarios can provide the data integrity and insight needed to meet regulations. Such an initiative may involve some heavy lifting, but the advantages extend far beyond compliance.
Cashing In on Bottom-Line Benefits
Consider the potential cost savings of taking a more holistic approach to data management. In our work with large global banks, we estimate that data management – including validation, reconciliation, and copying data from one data mart to another – accounts for 50% to 70% of total IT costs. Now factor in the benefits of reining in redundancy. One bank we’re currently working with is storing the same finance and risk-related data 20 times. This represents a huge opportunity to save costs by eliminating data redundancy and all the associated processes that unfold once you start replicating data across multiple sources.
With the convergence of finance and risk, we’re seeing more banks reviewing their data architecture, thinking about new models, and considering how to handle data in a smarter way. Thanks to modern methodologies, building a unified platform that aligns finance and risk no longer requires a rip-and-replace process that can disrupt operations. As with any enterprise initiative, it’s best to take a phased approach.
Best Practices in Creating a Unified Data Platform
Start by identifying a Chief Data Officer (CDO) who has strategic responsibility for the unified platform, including data governance, quality, architecture, and analytics. The CDO oversees the initiative, represents all constituencies, and ensures that the new data architecture serves the interests of all stakeholders.
Next, define a unified set of terms that satisfies both your finance and risk constituencies while addressing regulatory requirements. This creates a common language across the enterprise so all stakeholders clearly understand what the data means. Make sure all stakeholders have an opportunity to weigh in and explain their perspective of the data early on because certain terms can mean different things to finance and risk folks.
In designing your platform, take advantage of new technologies that make previous IT models predicated on compute-intensive risk modeling a thing of the past. For example, in-memory computing now enables you to integrate all information and analytic processes in memory, so you can perform calculations on-the-fly and deliver results in real time. Advanced event stream processing lets you run analytics against transaction data as it’s posting, so you can analyze and act on events as they happen.
Such technologies bring integration, speed, flexibility, and access to finance and risk data. They eliminate the need to move data to data marts and reconcile data to meet user requirements. Now a single finance and risk data warehouse can be flexible and comprehensive enough to serve many masters.
Join our webinar with Risk.net on 7 October, 2015 to learn best practices and benefits of deploying an integrated finance and risk platform.
