OmniFi

Delivering faster, more responsive financial reporting

Challenges

For the risk management department of this central bank, running large and complex reports on the performance of investment portfolios, and distributing the results, is an important daily requirement.

For example, the daily exposure and performance report is a key report for its portfolio managers and for risk and compliance. It tracks the market values for the bank’s portfolios, monitors the management of cash reserves against a benchmark portfolio and provides detail on counterparty limits and other critical metrics. This large report requires more than 100 individual queries to be run to extract data from Wallstreet Suite, the risk and performance management system used by this and many other central banks. The department also runs a series of other regular reports; for example, instrument prices are monitored daily and some interest calculations must be produced monthly.

This daily reporting task was proving extremely resource-intensive work, according to the bank’s analyst in the risk management department.
“We were doing a great deal of manual cut-and-paste work to produce the reports. The output was also not as user-friendly as we wanted.”

Although the bank was already using a proprietary reporting tool, it required a lot of manual work and the team was keen to bring a greater level of efficiency and responsiveness into the process. The bank was also considering building a data warehouse, so they wanted a reporting capability that would be easily integrated across different systems.

Solution

The bank’s analyst asked for a demonstration of SkySparc’s OmniFi and was immediately impressed by the level of transparency and automation that was offered. “OmniFi has a very user-friendly graphical user interface so it is easy to specify and set up complex reports,” he says, “The way the data is structured in the reports is transparent and easy to understand – and above all, OmniFi is very fast, so you can run and re-run reports as often as you need,” he adds. Once set up, OmniFi’s scheduler feature means the queries run automatically and the report is compiled at the same time each day, without further work required.

OmniFi is very use-friendly, reliable and fast for setting up and running reports. We have better quality reports faster and with less effort. We’re saving about four hours per day using OmniFi

Analyst, Risk Management

Results

Using OmniFi means the risk management department has improved both the quality and the efficiency of its financial reporting.

Cut-and-paste is now eliminated – and so too are the types of errors and omissions that can occur as a result of repetitive manual processing. With OmniFi, the queries run in the same way every time, with no deviations. “OmniFi is very reliable, so we have far fewer reporting errors,” comments the analyst.

As well as improved accuracy, OmniFi has also delivered welcome efficiencies for the team, “OmniFi is also very quick to use, both to set up reports and then to run them. Having OmniFi is saving us at least four hours of manual work every day, freeing analysts up for other work,” he says.

As and when the bank introduces a data warehouse, OmniFi offers powerful integration support between the risk management system and external systems. And OmniFi is also invaluable for automating testing and reconciliation of data – between systems, or following a systems upgrade, for example. So there’s an opportunity to use OmniFi to speed testing and reconciliation too.