Governance

Governance easing the burden of compliance by bringing clarity and confidence to the financial close process

When a global banking group, based in Switzerland, wanted to be more confident in their ability to report on their balance sheet attestation – for both different regulatory frameworks and accounting standards – they turned to BCS integrity.

Metrics and reporting

Using BCS integrity’s flexible mapping tools and regional access functionality, our client was able to load and segregate data from different feeding systems, including populating additional fields with relevant regulatory information. By mapping other feed data against the flexible reporting hierarchies in the system, they can now produce clear and targeted reporting across a range of different models and regulatory frameworks, without any manual effort.

By creating their own frequency based metrics from filters of relevant data, our client is able to monitor and track bespoke key regulatory risk or performance indicators across their data.

This included setting business unit and legal entity specific R/A/G thresholds as well as user defined graphical dashboards, which give senior management oversight of the financial close data and allowed for single click drilldown to the underlying detail.

Balance sheet level attestation

In addition to analysing the data being signed off under different criteria from the dashboards, some users also had responsibility for viewing or signing off the balance sheets for their business unit or legal entity. The balance sheet level attestation functionality within BCS integrity enabled them to assign a user or group to any point in the reporting hierarchies and display a summary of the line level sign-off process per chart of accounts category. This view can be refreshed in real time and allows the user or group to drill down to a ‘read only’ view of the underlying sign-offs. Balance sheet owners can also record their own certification against each chart of accounts category and/or the balance sheet as a whole for each accounting period.

Conclusion

By implementing BCS integrity, the client can load and report on different accounting standards or other regulatory frameworks effectively from within a single system, with targeted reporting bringing clarity at multiple levels in the process.