Visibility And Accountability

Improving transparency over the month end process

With the aim of gaining clarity over the ownership and attestation process being carried out by their worldwide teams, a major Australian financial services provider chose BCS integrity to replace their legacy in-house substantiation and financial close system.

Account ownership management

Given the large volume of data (in excess of 2.5 million balances) requiring attestation each month, our client’s existing system was struggling to record and provide an appropriate level of detail or control over the ownership of balances. With hundreds of owners handling sign-off every month, it was not practical to manage ownership individually, either by balance or user.

Our client’s solution was to use the automated rules based ownership functionality built into BCS integrity.

Our client set out the various matching criteria that determined which accounts should be assigned to which ownership groups in Excel and uploaded them into BCS integrity. By using a combination of the product’s wildcard and dynamic matching functionality, as well as an execution order, the accounts are now efficiently allocated to the correct owners based on their component values, without the need to explicitly reference each one. They also used ownership groups, rather than individual users, to more easily cope with absences, holidays and rolling segregation of duties between different users and locations.

Certification rules

Due to the global nature of their sign-off teams, our client wanted to ensure that they were enforcing the same level of rigour and process across the board. To achieve this, they made use of BCS integrity’s certification rules functionality, which restricts the status users can set against an account balance, depending on the status and exposure of any breaks that are raised against it. By configuring custom break fields and enforcing commentary where necessary, our client ensures that all relevant items are captured and reported to the appropriate level of detail.

Conclusion

By implementing BCS integrity, our client now has a fully audited set of account ownership criteria. Despite its large scope, it can be managed easily by business users in Excel. By using functionality such as wildcards and the rules’ in-built execution order matching, our client can ensure and demonstrate much better coverage across their accounts’ ownership. By forcing users to set specific statuses, depending on the risk profile of a given balance, all potential or actual exposure is now appropriately flagged and dealt with in the most efficient manner.